Archive of Our Own

He hadn’t known it at the time, but telling Rocky about his conscription on the Hail Mary ended up being an even more important conversation than he’d anticipated.

It hadn’t been an easy conversation. Not for him, and not for Rocky either. Of course Grace had the harder time with it, fighting back tears and feeling like he’d failed someone, somewhere. But Rocky sat unnaturally still in his ball, and although Grace had the sense he wasn’t upset with him, he could still tell that Rocky was upset about something.

“Grace should not have been forced to go,” Rocky said. Grace had already known Rocky would say that (even though he was still so nervous about Rocky’s reaction that he’d spent three days trying to figure out if he could ferment Taumoeba into some sort of Taulcohol so he wouldn’t have to have this conversation sober). Maybe he’d even expected some outrage and indignation on his behalf. But instead Rocky was pacing almost aimlessly in his ball, his song sour with some emotion subdued enough that Grace couldn’t get a read on it.

“You okay, buddy?” Grace asked, wiping his sleeve across his face.

“Grace should not have been forced to go,” Rocky repeated, carapace shifting in… discomfort? Anxiety? “Grace was not correct person for the job.”

That stung. Grace tried not to sound too hurt. “Well, actually. I was. I didn't want to admit it, but Stratt was right. I was the only choice.”

“Not what Rocky meant.” And he continued pacing. The idea occurred to Grace that maybe Rocky’s reaction was less about Grace and more about something else.

So he sat and watched Rocky pace some more, and after a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, Rocky said, “Rocky was proud to be chosen for Astrophage mission. Happy to be recognized as master in xenonite engineering. But… distraught to be designated correct person for the job. Terrified of risks.” And then more quietly, “Devastated to leave Adrian.”

“I thought everyone on your crew volunteered for the mission,” Grace said slowly.

“Yes,” Rocky said. “Chosen to volunteer.”

And then he started pacing again.

“Did you say no?” Grace felt like his heart was trying to climb into his throat. “Did anyone on your crew say no?”

“No,” Rocky said at once. “All agreed.” A beat. “But…”

Another pause. Grace sat still, waiting for Rocky to find the words.

“…Rocky did not think to say no,” he said. “Astrophage Thrum did not think Rocky would say no. Saying no to Thrum decision is concept like relativity or radiation. Not something anyone could account for.”

Grace had to take a beat himself to absorb what Rocky was saying. “So… you didn’t have a choice? None of you had a choice.”

There was definitely a defensive edge to Rocky’s staccato as he said, “Saying yes was a choice. Not thinking to say no was a choice.”

Grace couldn’t wrap his head around that. He sat there dumbly and wondered just what the hell a Thrum even was that they could pressgang even an Eridian as brilliant and bossy as Rocky.

And then Rocky hadn’t wanted to talk about it any more. At least not that day. 

A few days after that conversation, when Grace was trying to sleep and Rocky sat a few feet away from him, Rocky muttered softly, “Rocky wonder what would have happened if Rocky ran,” and then he shifted his legs underneath himself and when Grace asked about it, he said he was just having weird and bad thoughts and not to listen to him.

The conversation stuck in Grace’s head. He didn’t understand. And he wouldn’t understand until much later after they reached Erid.

Rocky tried to prepare him for certain realities of life on Erid. And Grace loved the guy and all, but he didn’t do a very good job of it. He kept waffling. Saying one thing and then contradicting himself just measures later.

To be completely fair, Grace was starving to death at the time. So he might not have been grasping the reality of the situation the way he ordinarily would.

“When we enter 40 Eridani A system, I’ll radio to Erid,” Rocky said. Grace was fluent enough in proper Eridian by then that Rocky hadn’t needed to utilize their first-contact pidgin in a long time. “I’ll explain about the Taumoeba and about you. Insist on a simultaneous medical-scientific Thrum to make plans to ensure your survival even as the Astrophage Thrum convenes.”

“I thought a Thrum was the kind of thing where you couldn’t tell them what to do,” Grace said.

“A Thrum is exactly the kind of thing where you tell everyone what to do,” Rocky said. Then immediately contradicted himself by saying, “They’ll listen to me. Have to listen to me. Collective consensus will be to defer to the only expert.”

(They didn’t utilize their pidgin anymore, but Rocky still had a fairly blunt manner of speaking. Grace got the sense that was just Rocky’s personality.)

“I will advocate for you,” Rocky hummed softly. “But you must understand. I won’t be part of the Thrum until we reach Erid. I can’t offer my resonance. They will save Savior Grace, I’m certain they will. If anything is wrong with their decision, I will fix it.” He practically whistled the modal verb, and Grace, in the fog of exhaustion, thought Rocky was trying to reassure him. He didn’t realize until later that Rocky was promising to do the impossible for him.

By the time they reached Erid’s orbit, Grace was too weak to really process what was going on around him. He spent the ride down in the Eridian space elevator flickering in and out of consciousness. He remembered being lifted and moved to a painfully hard surface for transport, and he remembered Rocky’s shrill protests as he was strapped down. “No! Savior Grace requires soft bedding! You will tear open his sores if you don’t treat him with the utmost care!”

“C’mon, Rock, don’t talk about my sores,” Grace managed to mutter. The Eridian medic that was shoving a too-stiff cannula up his nostrils flinched at the sound of his voice. “I wanna make a good first impression.”

“Save your energy!” Rocky honked and then went right back to yelling at the people who were trying to save his life.

Those first weeks were a blur. He remembered waking up in a hot room with tubes coming out of every orifice, panic choking him until the Eridians finally turned on the lights and he managed to convince himself that the last four years hadn’t been some messed up coma dream. He remembered needles and pills and needles and more needles. Jeezum Crow, he hated needles.

He remembered the doctors tapping at his head to see his brain, and tapping at his back to see his lungs. He remembered his doctors tapping at his stomach and complaining that he had so many loud fluids all over the place, it was difficult to hear anything in there.

He remembered Rocky sitting next to his narrow bed, as loud as a crashing chandelier as he argued with Grace’s doctors about his refeeding schedule being too slow, or his medication too strong. Steadfast in his belief that nobody knew as much about the care and keeping of humans as he did.

Grace wasn’t actually inclined to complain too much. There were a couple of uncomfortable hiccups (like the one doctor who seemed determined to misunderstand the differences between oral medication and suppositories), but he reasoned he couldn’t really expect much more when his medical care was in the hands of an alien species. None of them had ever even heard of a tooth or an eyeball before. They were doing their best.

But there was one time.

It was still early in his recovery. He wasn’t quite out of the woods yet. But he was having longer periods of wakefulness, and his doctors had been talking about maybe letting him try ambulating soon. Genuinely exciting news.

Rocky was gone for the moment. Meeting with a Thrum or being in a Thrum or whatever you did with Thrums. Thrumming. 

An Eridian he didn’t recognize entered the room. “Time for a physical examination!” They cheerfully announced. Grace began breathing deeply, anticipating he would have to gather his strength enough to lean forward and let the Eridian tap at his lungs and heart.

But instead they parked themselves at the foot of his bed, unfolding some sort of contraption. With a few clicks it took a familiar shape, and Grace felt his stomach drop at the sight of it.

Gynecological stirrups.

“What, uh, what are we doing exactly?” Grace asked.

“Full physical examination of Savior Grace’s reproductive system!” The Eridian chirped.

Oh boy.

“No, no thank you!” Grace pulled his blanket up a little higher. “Not interested in that at this time.”

“An examination of Savior Grace’s reproductive system is essential for a ♫♪♪ understanding of human health.” The Eridian laid out a sheet at the bottom of the bed.

“Sorry, a what understanding?”

“Not important! Savior Grace must move to the bottom of the bed and put feet in stirrups.”

Grace blinked. “I said no. I’m not doing that.”

“Repeating: this is very important for the health of Savior Grace.”

This Eridian had an odd manner of speaking. They had avoided using any pronouns at all so far. Grace realized they probably thought he was too stupid to understand Eridian’s complex hierarchy of pronouns and also thought he wouldn’t cotton on if they just called him Savior Grace enough times.

“I’m starving to death,” Grace said plainly. “That’s the only health issue I really care about at the moment. A Pap smear can wait until I’m healthier.”

“This doctor must insist on performing the examination on the reproductive system.”

“What’s your name, doctor?”

The Eridian shivered, an expression Grace recognized as discomfort when Rocky did it. “Do not know why Savior Grace needs this doctor’s name; Savior Grace cannot pronounce it—“

“I’ll remember it,” Grace interrupted. The tension in the room had him feeling a little nauseated. He wished Rocky was here to tell this doctor off for upsetting him. “But if you don’t want to give it, fine. I don’t let people I don’t know look at my junk. Please leave now.”

The doctor kept hovering. They shuffled their carapace in apparent confusion. 

Grace rolled over in bed to emphasize that he was done with this conversation. 

Eventually the strange Eridian left, but it ended up causing some kind of kerfuffle that Grace didn’t really understand at the time. Another doctor, much more polite than the first, came in a few hours later to try to talk Grace into the exam, and when Grace turned them down as well, they sent in a whole swarm of doctors to interrogate him as to why he was so insistent on damaging his health by refusing the exam.

It was super fun trying to explain the concept of gender to a bunch of aliens.

“Is this like your human perception of colors?” one of the Eridians asked.

Grace sighed. “Sure. Think of it like that if you have to. I have the wrong colors and it makes issues relating to my reproductive system very sensitive for me.”

“I’ve heard of this,” the Eridian said, purring reassuringly. “This must be the human racism I’ve read about.”

When Rocky next visited, he seemed a little harried. “You turned down some kind of procedure?”

“They wanted to look at my genitals,” Grace said, and Rocky chittered softly in understanding. 

“You’ve made a bit of a mess,” Rocky said, sounding apologetic.

“Wait, how? All I did was turn down a medical exam.”

“It’s not important. I’ll take care of it. Make them understand humans share Eridian taboos and need for privacy regarding sexual matters. But will you do it eventually? In a few months when you’re feeling better?”

Grace pouted. “Rocky, I never even got those kinds of exams back on Earth.”

“Please don’t be stupid,” Rocky said, and the extra-loud way he trilled his plea told Grace he was only asking nicely because Grace was still half-dying and under any other circumstance, he’d just be calling him stupid stupid stupid. “You’re not allowed to die of human sex cancer for another two hundred years.”

Grace couldn’t help the little smile that flashed across his face. “Darn. My weekend plans are ruined.”

And then Rocky left and did whatever he did to smooth over whatever mess Grace hadn’t even realized he was making, and the doctors stopped asking about his vagina for a while. Six weeks later, a doctor gave Grace a mild tranquilizer and he got his exam done with Rocky right next to him the whole time, reminding the doctor to touch gently, listen respectfully.

He kept his eyes closed for most of the exam. He could feel something touching him deep inside, and he thought he felt a buzz that extended beyond the doctor’s touch into his uterus, into his ovaries. He shuddered and the doctor muttered a soft apology that sounded like a wind chime.

Despite the mess that he made that he still didn’t entirely understand, the Eridians liked him.

Rocky had told him that they would, once they got past his most alien attributes; the mouth that never stopped flapping, the jelly-like eyes, and his thin skin stretched over knobby bones.

“…and the bones are wet, too,” Rocky finished. “Why is every part of you wet? Freakish.”

“Rocky, has anyone ever told you you’d make a fantastic seventh grader? You’d fit right in.”

“Grace would make a fantastic sixth grader.”

“Well, you’d make a fantastic fifth grader.”

“Grace would make a fantastic hatchling.”

“That’s like, what, a toddler, right? Well, you’d be a fantastic chihuahua. One of the little mean ones that run on spite and go around attacking ankles.”

“Grace, don’t be childish. This is not the time for jokes.”

Grace wadded up a tissue and tossed it at Rocky. It bounced off his xenonite suit.

“Very important members of some very important Thrums want to come meet you,” Rocky said. 

“You— oh, wait, you’re being serious.”

“Yes.” He managed to make the word sound like a fart as he sat heavily on his legs. “I don’t approve of this. You’re still so sick.”

Grace sat up in bed as much as he could manage. “It’s okay. I mean, they don’t expect me to run a marathon, right? Or save any other planets?”

“No. Just want to meet the alien.” Rocky tapped the floor in agitation. “You need to be resting. Not entertaining stupid politicians.”

“No, no, really. It’s okay. I don’t mind. The least I can do is let them see me, right?” He tried for a sheepish smile. “I mean, they’re the only things standing between me and death-by-boiling-ammonia, right?”

Rocky jumped up making a noise like radio static if static hurt to listen to. Grace flinched away.

“No!” Rocky cried. “Do not even joke about that! These people, they’re treating you like you’re a pet! Demanding you speak and perform tricks when you nearly died! Died to save their arrogant carapaces—”

“Rocky, Rocky, Rocky, hey—” Grace slid off the bed. Rocky caught him at once, hard edges of xenonite digging into Grace’s sides. Grace hid his wince as best as he could and murmured, “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s good for me if I meet them, yeah? Then I’ll meet them. It’s okay.”

Rocky rumbled unhappily even as he stroked Grace’s arm. “Grace needs to value himself. Self-sacrificing idiot. Stupid face.”

Grace smiled wetly.  “Stooping to fourth-grade level insults. I love you too, buddy.”

But it turned out Rocky had a point after all, because Grace had been envisioning one or two meetings with a handful of Eridians, but it turned out that a lot of Eridians were Very Important People and they all wanted to meet him. So instead of one or two comfortable visits from his hospital bed, he wound up hosting multiple entourages of Eridians nearly every day for a period of several weeks.

Almost none of them would come into his room, though. Grace supposed that made sense; why risk exposing themselves to Grace’s dangerous atmosphere when they could stay behind a clear xenonite panel in the wall instead? And Eridians tended to come in lots of different shapes and sizes, so Grace imagined it would be difficult to craft xenonite suits for each individual visitor.

Even with only hosting most of his guests from behind a xenonite wall, the visits were still exhausting. They also didn’t leave him a lot of personal time, but then again, he didn’t have much to do with his personal time these days. At least the throngs of Eridians gave him a reason to shave every day.

Rocky was there for these visits more often than not, but even he had to sleep and Thrum and (probably) see his mate occasionally. So sometimes Grace was on his own facing a room full of friendly Eridians and very little context for who they were, exactly, and how they might hold his fate in their hands.

But they liked him! Almost uniformly, they liked him a lot. They liked that he was smart and not extremely self-important and had sacrificed so very much to ensure their survival and the survival of their loved ones. Almost every visitor he had thanked him very sincerely. Most of them wanted to reassure him that he would have a comfortable and long life on Erid.

Some of them wanted to touch him. After a few inquiries, someone eventually installed a small panel of flexible xenonite into the wall, just like the one Rocky had once had on his hamster ball. It let Grace push his hand through the wall so the Eridians on the other side could poke his palm and spread his fingers.

He taught them how to shake hands and told them it was a gesture of friendship and respect among his people. The Eridians would chitter and shift from foot to foot, nervous and excited, and shake his hand and tell him he would be beloved on Erid for all time.

When it finally started, Rocky couldn’t protect him.

It wasn’t Rocky’s fault. He did his best. Neither of them saw it coming.

Grace had made pretty much a full recovery. Still living in the too-hot room while Rocky and his mate and a bunch of other Eridians put together a habitat for him that would keep him comfortable and sane. He was told that apart from the gravity, it would replicate Earth conditions with at least 80% accuracy. Rocky said that they were designing a beach with real waves. He was very excited about the waves because Adrian was working hard to make them big, but not too big.

Grace was looking forward to the beach. Twice a day, when the doctors came by to give him his shots, he closed his eyes and thought about being on the beach. Wind in his hair, sun on his face. But not too much sun. He’d rather have a nice overcast day gently warming him. He’d feel the pinch of a needle in his abdomen and imagine he was on a beach and a crab was saying hello and the sky was so overcast he wouldn’t have been able to see a rainbow even if it was there.

Needles and needles and needles. Countless injections since the beginning. He had never been good with them even before the mission, and he would probably never be good with them now. For months he had been getting twice-daily shots of medications and hormones and an occasional vaccine thrown in for good luck.

It was difficult to talk about his own medical care with the Eridians. The terminology was so specialized, and more often than not the Eridian language didn’t even have words for what they were doing to him or what they were giving him. If he asked about his medication, they would tell him the word they’d invented and try to explain the dosage and purpose and function. But it got pretty confusing sometimes. He’d once managed to get the Eridians to explain that they were giving him a shot to stop egg production, and he’d gotten pretty excited thinking they might be putting him back on testosterone. But in the end it turned out to be a GnRH agonist, a medication commonly used as a puberty blocker as it suppressed all sex hormones. Figuring that out alone had taken several days and a number of conversations with a number of his doctors and pharmacologists. 

He did his best to keep himself informed on what they were giving him, but he knew there were holes in his knowledge. He didn’t like feeling in the dark about his own medical care. He had never felt so uninformed as a patient before.

Adding to the confusion was that most of his medications were being delivered by injection, even ones that would’ve been pills back on Earth. He had asked about that too, and his doctors had said that most of what Grace needed was more easily and readily formulated in injections. But Grace suspected that his pharmacology team might have been actively trying to eliminate oral medication where they could so his medical team wouldn’t have to watch him eat pills.

The endless shots were taking a physical toll, too. His butt was numb, his thighs were bruised, and his abdomen was swollen and tender and covered with needle marks that never managed to heal before another set came to take their place.

His abdomen was actually very swollen. And very tender. It kind of felt like he was about to get the worst period of his life, and that included a persistent bout of nausea and diarrhea that didn’t seem to want to let up.

His doctors put him back on a fluid drip to keep him hydrated. Rocky fretted about Grace’s electrolytes and told him to eat salt.

He got his shots and he puked and moaned and hugged the toilet and got his shots again and puked some more and he wasn’t losing any weight despite all the puking and the pooping he was doing and his abdomen was so swollen and it hurt to touch it—

And then he curled around the toilet and there was a white-hot stab of pain deep in his pelvis and he screamed Rocky’s name thinking oh jeez was it human sex cancer all along? Rocky’s gonna kill me and then he heard one of the doctors yell “Sedate them!” and Grace screamed for a different reason as another needle found its way into his neck again.

When he woke up, it felt like no time at all had passed and he was groggy and sore. He clicked his dry tongue against the roof of his mouth and then suddenly thought oh no who am I?! His hands flew to his face, feeling a four-year beard that wasn’t there.

“Grace!” Rocky suddenly appeared, trying to climb onto the bed like an over-eager dog. Oh, thank goodness he remembered Rocky. His name was Ryland Grace and he remembered Rocky.

“Ow, careful,” Grace croaked. But he scooted to make room to Rocky even though it hurt to move. “What the heck happened?”

“Reproductive issue. Doctors called it ♪♫♪♫♩. They had to put you to sleep, perform minor surgery to fix it.”

“Uh… need word. What exactly was wrong?”

“Organ that produces eggs twisted on itself. Cutting off blood supply.”

“Ovarian torsion,” Grace said with a wince. “Jeez. Was that the matter with me this whole time?”

“The doctors also said your abdomen was full of fluid. They drained it with a long needle.”

Grace ran his hands down his face with a shudder. “Almost glad I don’t remember that one.”

Rocky curled up next to Grace. “Sorry. I know you never wanted to be put to sleep like that ever again. Wasn’t anything I could do.”

Grace wrapped one arm around Rocky. It was as much of a hug as he could manage. “It’s okay. I’m sorry for giving you a scare.”

“It wasn’t your fault this time, so I’ll forgive you.”

That was a quip only half as intense as it could’ve been, and so Grace reasons that Rocky must have been really scared for him.

The next time he got up to go to the bathroom, Rocky insisted on helping him there. Grace saw soft batting wadded between his legs, and a mess of bright red blood on the batting, and Rocky shivered and didn’t call him leaky or disgusting, and that was how Grace knew that Rocky was still really scared for him.

Grace looked up from his book as an Eridian with a light pink carapace entered his room. It wasn’t one of his doctors or anyone else he recognized from his various care teams. It must have been a visitor— a very strange visitor at that. Hardly anyone came to see him alone, and hardly anyone came into his room.

They liked him. But he was an alien. He thought he made most of them a little nervous.

Grace marked his place in his book. “Hi there. I’m Ryland Grace of the planet Earth. It’s nice to meet you.”

“We’ve met before.” The pink Eridian said it kindly, sounding a little amused that Grace hadn’t recognized them. They pushed their front-facing legs together in greeting, but nothing about the carvings there or the Eridian’s appearance looked familiar to Grace at all. “I visited you previously with other members of the Navigation Thrum.”

Grace winced, smiling apologetically. “Sorry! Really sorry! I’ve gotten a lot of visitors over the past few months.”

“Have you not gotten many repeat visitors?”

Grace shrugged. “A few. Scientists and engineers, usually. They want to know about Earth or about human biology or about the Hail Mary. I’ve gotten a few mathematicians, funny enough. They seem to think it’s weird that a civilization managed to build a spaceship without being able to instantly perform complex equations in our heads.”

“I’ve heard about that. It is weird.” Then, with the casual air of someone sharing a joke between friends, “Some members of the Thrum have speculated that maybe the human we got just has brain damage.”

Grace burst out laughing. What a risky joke to make to an alien visitor!

The Eridian made a pleased chittering noise. It said, “Your friend Rocky nearly popped when that chord reached them. They made such a cacophony that we nearly had to discontinue the Thrum.”

“Yeah, he’s the only person who’s allowed to call my squishy meat brain bad and dumb.” Grace leaned forward. “Since when is he a member of the Navigation Thrum? He isn’t a pilot by trade.”

“To most of Erid, they’re Savior Rocky now. They have the latitude to join nearly any Thrum they wish.”

That made sense to Grace. Rocky had been running around like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to keep up with all the decisions being made about Grace’s welfare. He’d probably go join the Slug Enthusiast Thrum for an afternoon if he thought they’d be Thrumming about Grace.

“Rocky is actually why I’m here,” the pink Eridian said. “Rather, I suppose it’d be more correct to say that them not being here is why I’m here. I wanted to meet with you personally and privately. Get a better sense of who you are as a person.”

That was sort of curious. Grace realized suddenly that he wasn’t used to any Eridian other than Rocky treating him as a person as opposed to a spectacle or a patient. “You can’t do that with Rocky here?”

“Rocky has become discordant since returning to Erid,” the pink Eridian said. “That incident I mentioned where they disrupted the Thrum has not been an isolated incident. They aren’t acting like a typical Eridian. After everything they’ve been through, I suppose anyone would be changed. I feel as though in order to understand why Rocky is acting the way they do, I must understand you as well.”

“Oh, I get it,” Grace said. “You think we’re influencing each other. So you wanted to meet me in isolated circumstances. As much as that’s possible.”

“Precisely.” The pink Eridian tapped the floor with polite curiosity. “I heard you once refused a medical procedure your doctor wanted to perform on you.”

“Oh my god.” Grace tilted his head back, exasperated. “That was one time, okay? What I don’t understand is how Rocky can boss around all my doctors, telling them they’re doing their jobs wrong, but I decline one exam and suddenly it’s a big deal?”

“I suppose it must be a cultural difference,” the pink Eridian said. “Eridian society is focused on collaboration and compromise. Outright opposition to any compromise is considered to be nearly dangerous. We do not refuse those who are in a position of authority over us.”

“So Rocky yelling at my doctors is alright because it’s still technically a kind of collaboration?”

“This is part of what I meant when I spoke about Rocky having become discordant. It is not typical of an Eridian to… argue with authority in quite the way he has done lately.”

Grace was reminded with a sudden discomfort of Rocky telling him that it hadn’t even occurred to him to turn down his assignment to the Astrophage mission. 

“You know, where I come from, it’s normal to question authority,” Grace said. “We even protest our governments sometimes in big groups that are probably a little like a Thrum.”

“I don’t think one way to be is good and the other is bad,” the pink Eridian said, cocking a leg toward Grace conciliatorily. “The problem only arises when a person no longer fits comfortably in society. It causes a measure of friction.”

Grace said, “I mean, I wasn’t trying to cause problems when I turned down the exam. It’s just that that particular doctor was kind of rude and disrespectful and wanted to shove some things in an uncomfortable place without warning. I did consent to the exam later under different circumstances and had a much better experience than I would’ve had with that first doctor.”

“Yes,” the Eridian said. “I can see that you’re a reasonable being. You’re open to compromise when it’s in your best interest.”

Grace smiled. “Yes, exactly.”

”And I hope you don’t misunderstand my intentions in asking about you refusing your doctor. I admire your character. Do you mind me asking whether you’d consider yourself an example of a typical human?”

Grace shrugged helplessly. “Typical in some ways, bizarre in others?”

“I suppose that likely applies to any sapient being.”

“At any rate, I don’t think I’m a massive outlier.”

“That’s good to hear. The Navigation Thrum has been planning a series of probes which will be sent to Earth to establish contact with your people.”

Grace sat up suddenly. “Wait, really? That’s incredible! Already?”

“The project is still in very early phases. We’re hoping you’d be amenable to sending a message back to Earth on the first probe to encourage friendship between our planets.”

“Yes, of course! Wow.” He leaned back with a dazed smile. “I never thought I’d be an ambassador to an alien race.” 

“We’re hoping you’ll be more someday,” the Eridian said. 

“I can’t believe Rocky didn’t tell me Erid is planning to establish contact with Earth.”

“Rocky hasn’t been able to attend a Navigation Thrum in several Earth months. The Thrums conflict with their counseling appointments.”

“Oh,” Grace said. “He didn’t tell me he was in counseling, either.” A feeling of discomfort sat low in Grace’s gut. He didn’t like hearing about this second-hand.

“My apologies. I assumed you knew. I appreciate your hospitality and your openness in speaking to me.”

“Oh, shoot, my manners,” Grace said. “I just realized I never asked who you are. I’m sorry.

The pink Eridian laughed softly. “Don’t be. It’s alright. I’m just an underpaid, underappreciated Navigator who’s trying to lay the foundation for a better society.”

“Oh, so you’re a teacher.”

The Eridian laughed again. “In a way, I suppose I am! Doctor Grace, thank you for meeting with me. Perhaps once communication has been established with Earth, the Navigation Thrum will send you to Earth with a delegation of Eridians.”

“Oh.” Grace blinked. “That’s a nice thought. But I probably won’t live that long. Even if you sent a probe out today, it’d be over thirty Earth years before you received your first response. I’ll be approaching the end of my life by then. There’s no way I’ll still be around by the time communications with Earth have progressed to the point where you’d send an inhabited spaceship to meet us.”

The pink Eridian made a soft humming noise. “Perhaps. We’ll see.”

Later that day, when Grace described his visitor to Rocky, Rocky stilled.

“I know this person. They told you they’re a pilot?” Rocky asked.

“They said they were part of the Navigation Thrum.”

“The Navigation Thrum is not a Thrum for pilots,” Rocky said. “Navigation is as in navigating Erid into civilization. It’s the Thrum which oversees all other Thrums. It’s the highest decision-making body on the planet.”

Grace’s eyes widened. “I got visited by the President? …Twice? And you didn’t tell me the first time?”

“You got visited by one-sixtieth of the President. I’m one-sixtieth of the President now, sort of. Didn’t think it was a big deal.” He paused before specifying, "That one-sixtieth of the president oversees the Thrums relating to you.”

Oh. Grace supposed that’s why they wanted to talk to him.

“I don’t like them,” Rocky said. “They were the person who first suggested mandatory counseling. The rest of the Thrum harmonized. Humiliating.”

“Jeez, Rocky. Do you know how messed up you have to be for the President to send you to therapy?”

“Yes, yes, I know. Rocky crazy, statement. That’s not the point.” Rocky tapped his own fingers. “…Think I was obstructed from joining recent Thrums on purpose. Not just because I was discordant. I think they’re trying to hide things from me.”

“Like what?”

Rocky shifted. “I don’t know.”

Grace’s bio-dome was mere hours away from being ready for him. Grace could barely sit down. He hadn’t slept at all the night before and his fingers buzzed with excitement.

He was packing up the last of his belongings when one of his doctors entered the room. It was the Eridian who had been so gentle with his Pap smear and had overseen his care relating to his ovarian torsion. They were a nice enough person, but Grace’s stomach dropped at the sight of them anyway.

The doctor apologized for the abruptness of their visit. They explained that they had only recently seen the dimensions of Grace’s new habitat and realized that with so much more room, it was inevitable that Grace would be much more physically active.

He was at risk of his ovary twisting again. He required an urgent examination to ensure the surgical fix was holding before he could move in.

Grace slumped onto his bed, nauseated. Rocky wasn’t even here; he was off setting up some finishing touches on the house he and Adrian built for him. “Today? Now? Can’t I move in today and get the exam tomorrow?”

The doctor was very sorry. It was too risky. They could do the examination tomorrow and move Grace in afterwards if Grace needed more time.

Grace’s head began to spin. He knew Rocky was setting up a party for him. It was supposed to be a secret but Rocky was just so flipping excited about it that Grace could tell anyway. It wouldn’t be anything big, probably just him and Rocky and maybe Adrian and some banners and movies and video games. But he’d wanted so badly to see what color the banners ended up being when Rocky couldn’t even see color. He’d wanted to go back to feeling like a person with a life and a house and a beach he walked along every day and he’d been trapped in this little too-hot room for months and months and he thought he’d been just fine with it all yesterday but now he felt like if he spent one more night confined to this room, he’d start climbing the walls.

The doctor gently touched Grace’s knee. Grace blinked at them, tears clouding his vision.

“I can offer you another tranquilizer,” the doctor said kindly. “If it’d make things easier on you.”

Grace swallowed thickly and nodded before he could change his mind. “Okay. Do it quick. Please.”

So he got the tranquilizer. One more shot between his two other rounds of shots of the day. He didn’t even care anymore. He laid back and spread his legs and thought about cake and beer and his best friend in the whole world who was waiting for him just a few miles away. The doctor spread him open and put something inside him and

tap

tap

tapped

deep deep inside of him and then withdrew a small tube and withdrew the speculum.

“All done,” the doctor said gently. “Everything looks good. You’re cleared to leave.”

Grace released a breath. His hands were shaking. He felt fine.

Two hours later he dragged the first crate of his belongings across the beach. His beach. The sand crunched under his shoes and the waves roared in his ears.

His house was just ahead, up on a rocky hill, and Grace thought it was the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen.

It was near-immediately surpassed in his estimation when he got close enough to see Rocky waiting in the open doorway, a banner hanging above him that said WELCOME HOME GRACE in sludge brown letters on a puke green background. Rocky was bouncing from foot to foot and when he got sick of waiting for Grace to trudge up the pathway, he catapulted himself down the hill and just barely stopped himself from colliding with Grace as he rolled into a hug. He was singing an octave higher than he normally did, barely coherent to Grace. Grace burst into tears and Rocky laughed and dragged him back up the path to his house.

There wasn’t beer or cake, but Grace was finally home, and that was enough.

About a month later, Grace woke up abruptly one morning, stumbled into the bathroom, and puked his brains out.

It happened again the morning after, too. And again in the evening when he tried to make himself dinner. And again in the middle of the night when he could hear nothing but the distant lull of the waves and his own heartbeat pounding in his ears.

Grace’s gynecologist made a lot of house calls. As much as Grace knew this was a good thing for him, he hated the necessity of these visits. He couldn’t even put them off in good conscience because the persistent nausea was one of the first symptoms he’d had during his ovarian torsion and he knew he needed to make sure it didn’t happen again. For his own good.

They worked out a schedule in advance so Grace wouldn’t be caught by surprise like the last time and Rocky could be there as often as possible. The gynecologist came by once a week to draw some blood, put Grace in stirrups, and poke around his insides. At every visit, they’d say that things looked good and that Grace should refrain from heavy exercise or any activities that could injure him.

About a month after the nausea started, the doctor asked, “Are you having any other concerning symptoms?”

“Um…” Grace shifted on the bed. The knot of anxiety that had been sitting tight in his chest for most of the day so far suddenly felt bigger. “Rock, do you think you could go outside for a minute?”

Rocky slanted his body in alarm. “You are having symptoms!?”

“Rock, please. I don’t really wanna talk about it. It’s embarrassing.”

“What could possibly be embarrassing? Years alone on the Hail Mary, I watched you poop, I watched you masturbate, I watched you eat.”

Grace covered his face. “Can you please not talk about me masturbating in front of the doctor?”

“Now, now, it’s perfectly normal…” the doctor said, sounding a little bewildered anyway.

“What could possibly be so personal that you’d want to hide it from me?”

Grace felt a little like he was leaving his body. “My… chest aches.”

Rocky slanted his body the other way, probably experiencing a different kind of alarm.

“Do you mean a lung hurt or a heart ache?” the doctor asked. “Muscle ache? Breast ache?”

“Um. That one. My, uh, my nipples hurt, too.”

“May I touch?” the doctor asked. 

“Fine,” Grace said, still covering his face. The doctor was gentle, but the tissue felt downright inflamed and Grace had to regulate his breathing to ensure he didn’t make any noise. He just knew Rocky was watching him and he couldn’t bear to think about what Rocky must’ve been thinking of all of this.

“You’ve gained a little volume,” the doctor said, and Grace moaned in horror. “You should stop wearing that compression garment you use to cover your chest. It may be further irritating the tissue.”

Grace had no intention of doing so but nodded anyway. “Tell me you know how to fix this.”

“I’ll adjust your medications. The time is probably right to eliminate some of the hormonal supplements you were previously on. That may help with your nausea, too.”

Grace was on the verge of just asking the doctor to cut his breasts off, but he didn’t want to scare Rocky any further. He wished he’d taken out a loan or gotten a second job or sold his bike or done something else to afford The Chop back when he was still on Earth so this wouldn’t ever have been a problem.

After the doctor left, Grace pulled his binder back on.

Rocky stamped a foot. “You said you’d stop wearing that.”

“I lied, buddy.”

“Grace, take it off. It’s only going to hurt you even more.”

“How the fuck do you know what hurts me!?” Grace snapped.

Rocky recoiled, squeaking like a steam whistle.

An awful, cold feeling seeped down Grace’s body. “Oh. Rocky. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it, I don’t know what came over…”

His throat swelled shut and his face crumpled. The next thing he knew he was curled up in a ball on the floor, weeping into his knees.

Rocky gingerly approached and stroked Grace’s hair. “You’re scaring me. You haven’t been acting like yourself.”

Grace blurbled out a noise. Wasn’t it his signature move to leak tears and snot all over everything?

“Not what I mean,” Rocky said, because of course he was able to decipher all of Grace’s weird sounds. “You sometimes went days without wearing your binder on Mary. And when you were recovered enough from starvation to have any substantial breast tissue. You never cared this much about it before. What’s changed?”

Nothing, really. Nothing had changed except that his chest hurt. But that wasn’t a good enough reason to suddenly be upset and anxious and lashing out.

Grace wiped his face and tried to get a handle on his crying. Rocky helped by rubbing his back, and soon enough Grace was able to sit up and breathe in, hold it, and breathe out.

“Hormonal issues can cause mood swings in humans,” Grace croaked. “Maybe the doctor is right and stopping some of the shots will fix everything.”

“Maybe,” Rocky echoed.

Grace stood in front of his mirror. He looked at himself head-on. He turned to the side. He pressed his fingers into his abdomen just below his belly button.

Yep. He was definitely swollen. 

He groaned, running a hand down his face. Did he need to call his doctor about this? It was swollen, but he didn’t think it was tender. And his nausea hadn’t been an issue for weeks now. In fact, he had been really hungry lately.

He really didn’t think the symptoms he’d been experiencing for the last couple of months had anything to do with his ovarian torsion anymore. They probably never had been related at all.

Maybe it was just some ordinary weight gain. It sort of made sense. That would explain why his chest was still bigger than it used to be, too.

He frowned. The Grace in the mirror frowned back at him. A sliver of belly was visible underneath his t-shirt. The last time he’d worn this shirt, that little sliver of belly hadn’t been there.

He crossed the house, grabbing his laptop and flopping down across his couch. His laptop rested on the swell of his abdomen as he opened his browser and pulled up a database of symptoms and their potential causes.

Nausea. Weight gain. Increased appetite. Fatigue. Frequent urination. 

He cross-referenced with an open notebook, writing down possible diagnoses. Stomach viruses, food poisoning, metabolic changes, depression, various kinds of cancers.

Pregnancy popped up a lot, too. Over and over, for every symptom. None of the other diagnoses appeared for every one of his symptoms.

“Wouldn’t that be a riot?” Grace muttered to himself. “Human parthenogenesis in the only human on an alien planet. Maybe Zeus decided it’s been too long since I had a golden shower.”

He chewed his lip for a moment. Then he crossed out the nausea-related differentials. He hadn’t had any nausea for a while, anyway. Maybe that had been unrelated.

He double-checked his work. Pregnancy was still at the top of the list.

“What the fuuuuuudge,” he groaned as he looked back to the laptop and scrolled down for more possible causes.

Ectopic Pregnancy. The next differential after that was Multiples Pregnancy.

Grace slammed the laptop shut. He let out a deep, annoyed huff.

It was probably some metabolic weirdness. That was the only thing that made any sort of sense. It couldn’t be cancer or anything; he was still getting checked out once a week by his gynecologist. Any sort of tumor large enough to cause swelling would’ve been caught ages ago.

And it definitely couldn’t be pregnancy. He hadn’t even seen another human being in years.

He could only imagine what Rocky would say if Grace asked about it. Hey, Rocky, how does asexual reproduction work on Erid? What do you suppose the odds are that I breathed in some weird pollen you carried in on your suit and got Virgin Pregnant? Not that I’m a virgin, but—

He opened his laptop just so he could slam it shut again. He jumped off the couch, shaking his arms out. This was stupid. He was being stupid. There was absolutely no chance he could be pregnant.

“That would’ve been caught already, too,” Grace said out loud as the idea occurred to him. That was right. A tumor or a fetus, either would’ve been caught during one of his latest examinations. He’d been getting the Eridian version of an ultrasound every week since he moved into his bio-dome.

…Why did it take him a few minutes to think of that?

(Maybe because ultrasounds were just the thing that you get when you’re—)

Grace went for a run. He pulled on some shorts and slapped on his headphones and turned the volume way up. Way, way up to the point where Rocky would’ve yelled at him for damaging his hearing if he was there. He ran down the hill and across the beach and up around to the rocky formations down by the water. His unbound, aching chest swung absurdly with every footfall. He had a mad feeling of being watched, as a bug in a cage being studied. He wanted to cross his arms like a self-conscious teen, but he couldn't run that way. Instead he just kept running, and when he looped back around to his house, he went for another lap around the dome, and then another.

When he was finished he was covered in sweat and gasping like a dying fish, staggering up to his door with a stitch in his side and shaking knees. He went to his sink and stuck his head under the tap and blasted the cold water until he couldn’t feel his face anymore.

His heart was still pounding. From the run. Definitely from the run.

Grace watched from his window as the Eridian he considered his gynecologist ambled along toward his house.

His heart was in his throat. He couldn’t speak. He could barely breathe.

What would the Eridian say? That there was nothing wrong with him? Just like last week and the week before that? Like he’d been saying for months by this point?

Rocky sat on the couch. Every so often, Grace could hear the soft rustle of Rocky shivering into his cushions and pillows. 

The doctor approached the door. Grace sank to the floor, arms huddled around his knees.

His swollen belly pressed into his thighs. 

The doctor knocked. Neither Grace nor Rocky made any move to answer.

After a while, the doctor knocked again. “Savior Grace? It’s time for your appointment. Are you there?”

Grace knew that the doctor knew he was there. They could hear through the xenonite walls. He still didn’t move.

“Savior Rocky?” The doctor called.

Rocky sat absolutely still.

After a few minutes, the doctor outside the door retreated, running his fingers down his arm as he went. “I’ll come back tomorrow. I hope you’re feeling better, Savior Grace.”

Grace put his face in his hands.

Rocky gingerly crawled off the couch. “…Grace?”

Grace looked. Rocky was holding something in his hands.

It was a speculum made out of smooth xenonite.

Grace’s breath hitched.

“I know,” Rocky said. “But we need to know what’s happening to you. The doctor keeps saying it’s nothing. Maybe it really is nothing. But we have to know, and I don’t trust anyone other than myself.”

Grace blinked slowly. After a long moment, he stood up. “…I don’t trust anyone other than you, either.”

He took Rocky to his bed. Rocky sat at the foot of it while Grace pulled off his pants and his underwear and laid down.

He stared at the ceiling. Rocky put a hand on Grace’s thigh and sat there without moving and without speaking until Grace’s breathing stabilized. Then Rocky gently pushed his legs apart.

Grace summoned the courage to look at him. Behind the hill of his belly, Rocky was applying Grace’s lube to the speculum.

“If you tell me to stop, I will,” Rocky said.

Grace shook his head. 

“Grace. Tell me you’ll tell me to stop.”

“What good would it do us?” Grace muttered. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Rocky made an unhappy rumbling noise. But he didn’t argue. He only said, “Take a deep breath.”

Grace inhaled.

“Let it out slowly.”

He exhaled. As he did, his best friend and the only person he loved slowly penetrated him with the speculum. A thought echoed wildly in his head— This isn’t fair! Grace had to abruptly stop breathing and bite his lip to stop himself from sobbing.

Rocky put a finger inside of him. Grace could feel his warmth through his thin xenonite suit.

And then Rocky tapped his walls. He paused. Grace wasn’t breathing, he couldn’t breathe—

“Grace,” Rocky said, his voice resonating like a gong. It was a familiar finality. It was Stratt telling him I am trying to make you understand what I’m about to do next.

Please stay calm.

Grace tore off the bed and the speculum ripped out of him. Rocky was on his heels, crying Grace’s name, telling him not to do anything rash—

Grace grabbed his laptop. It woke up as he typed, and when he had the image he wanted pulled up on his screen, he shoved it at Rocky.

“What did it look like!?” Grace demanded, brandishing a fetal development chart.

Rocky paused, a soft whistling escaping him. “Grace, I, Grace…” Then he made a choked noise and crossed the room to collect his camera gun and his interface.

He pointed his gun at the laptop screen, listening to it as well as he could when Grace’s hands were shaking it so badly.

Rocky pointed carefully at the fetus labeled Month 5. “Bigger than this.” Then he pointed at the one to its right, labeled Month 6. “Smaller than this.”

The laptop slipped from Grace’s hands. He crossed the room and headed for the door without even thinking. He was beyond thinking; he was a cornered animal. He needed to run but there was nowhere to run. There was a needle in his neck and a rainbow in the sky.

He reached for the door. Rocky moved in front of him.

“Grace, no.” 

Grace swiveled on his heel and screamed and shoved his bookshelf over. Paper scattered across the floor. He wasn’t thinking anymore, he was an animal looking for an escape. But there was no escape, because the danger was inside of him. The parasite, the tumor, the thing hijacking his body was already inside of him and had been for months. Now that he was aware of it, he could almost feel it sitting heavily inside of him, a hot coal burning him up deep where he couldn’t reach. The pain and the violation of it were twisting him up, making him sick, making him want to destroy everything around him and then himself for good measure.

Grace flipped a chair and kicked his coffee table, and lost himself for a long while.

By the time his higher function began to return, he was sitting in the corner of the room, panting and shaking. The day-night cycle of his dome had progressed enough that the ambient light coming through the window was a little dimmer. His house was a wreck and Rocky was sitting in his lap, four of his legs carefully positioned off of Grace and supporting his heft so he felt more like a weighted blanket than the 400 pound boulder he was. The last arm was wrapped around Grace’s middle in a hug.

Grace noticed that Rocky was wedged right up against his belly and the thing inside of it. Grace felt too drained to really care. He raised a hand so he could scratch Rocky’s xenonite shell.

Rocky definitely couldn’t feel it in any significant way, but he clicked softly and sank even further onto Grace’s lap. 

Grace shut his eyes and wrapped both his arms around Rocky. Neither of them moved again for a long time.

Rocky didn’t go home to Adrian that night. He said he wanted to stay and watch Grace sleep, but Grace didn’t want to sleep, and Rocky wouldn’t leave anyway. Instead they stayed up all night together, cleaning up Grace’s house and talking. 

Mostly they were just finding different ways of saying this is so messed up, but sometimes they found their way to discussing Grace’s situation

“How did this even happen?” Grace asked. His throat kind of hurt. He must’ve overdone it with the yelling earlier. “This is impossible.”

“It must have been your doctors,” Rocky muttered. “But how? I don’t know. I can’t know.”

“Where did the sperm even come from? Was it just hidden away in Mary and we never found it?”

“I would have seen it. I’m sure I would have seen it. But more importantly, you were on a suicide mission. Mary didn’t even have heat shielding because it was never intended to land. No one would ever have accounted for any of the crew surviving to repopulate somewhere else.”

“You don’t think…” Grace suddenly found it difficult to swallow. “...You don’t think they did some sort of biological engineering? In vitro gametogenesis?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Lab-grown sperm and eggs. Gametes. Basically the cutting-edge of reproductive science on Earth back before Mary launched. You’d take ordinary cells and reprogram them into…”

Grace’s voice died. If that was what the Eridians had done, then there was only one person they could’ve gotten the somatic cells from. Himself.

“Rocky, do Eridians ever self-fertilize their own eggs!?”

“Yesss?” Rocky said slowly. “It’s rare. There’s a stigma. It’s regarded as something only very narcissistic people do to ensure all their own worker cells are passed on to their offspring…”

Grace ran for the bathroom but didn’t make it. He ended up throwing up on his shoes while Rocky made a teakettle noise and said some stuff that Grace couldn’t pay attention to, because holy cow, that would’ve been an inbreeding coefficient of 50%. If the Eridians had taken both necessary gametes from his somatic cells, the fetus was equally inbred as a baby born from three successive generations of sibling mating. He envisioned double pairings of all his recessive alleles dotting the genetic code, the possibilities of all sorts of horrible diseases and physical defects entering his imagination. 

He’d once known a geneticist who was studying mutations linked to the BCOR gene. Some of her case studies had been born without eyes.

His esophagus hitched and he had to run for the toilet again.

Grace was very grateful that Rocky had stayed to help him clean his house.

Morning came. Rocky had to leave. He hadn’t wanted to. He’d told Grace over and over again that he would stay if he could. But he’d been in his xenonite suit for so long that the atmosphere inside had grown too hot for him to exchange heat effectively. He had to take his suit off and spend some time in an environment with more air flow or else he risked hurting himself.

Grace said he understood. He told Rocky to go. Go see Adrian, go eat something, go get some sleep. He nearly said I promise not to kill myself until you get back, but he wisely refrained. Rocky wouldn’t know he’d be joking.

(Grace didn’t know if he’d be joking.)

Rocky had only been gone ten minutes. Grace had been sitting at his laptop, his hands hovering over the keyboard as he tried to force himself to type the words knitting needles when there was a knock at the door.

Grace jumped up. If it was the doctor who had been giving him weekly examinations for five months and lying to his face every time, he was going to punt them into the ocean. He didn’t care if they weighed 500 pounds.

Grace opened the door. “Good morning,” the pink Eridian said. “May I come in?”

Grace blinked at them. “...Oh. It was you, wasn’t it? You’re the one who’s responsible for this? That’s why you’re here?

“Yes,” the pink Eridian said.

Grace looked the pink Eridian up and down. They were definitely too big to punt into the ocean. He closed the door.

“If I’m not welcome, then would you like to come outside?” The pink Eridian said, still audible from behind the door. “You must have questions. I swear to you there will be no more secrets.”

Grace hesitated. Nothing the pink Eridian could say or do would change anything, not unless they were about to apologize and offer Grace an immediate abortion. But he knew that wasn’t why they were there. No explanations could change how he felt or what had been done to him, so there wasn’t really a point to opening the door.

…But gosh-darn it. He was a scientist. How many vivisections got the chance to look their tormentors in the face and ask why this had to happen to them?

Grace opened the door. He went outside and sat down on a nearby rock.

The pink Eridian moved beside Grace and settled neatly on their legs. “Doctor Grace, I respect your time so I will try not to waste it. Your medical care team transferred a human embryo into your uterus during your pelvic exam dated +∀:V+ℓ. That was the day you moved into your bio-dome. Clarifying that I am utilizing your base-10 mathematical system and Earth timekeeping, you are eighteen weeks and one day pregnant.”

An incredulous laugh huffed out of Grace. Sweet jelly. He was nearly halfway through with it already. He was gonna need some big knitting needles.

“This human embryo was created with an egg we collected from you which had its nucleus removed and replaced with a donor nucleus from one of your muscle cells.”

…What?

The Eridian continued, “This process has a name in your language, but I don’t believe it has been communicated between our languages yet.”

“Somatic cell nuclear transfer,” Grace murmured. “It’s a clone? You cloned me!?”

It was probably more than a little messed up that he was actually relieved that his pregnancy hadn’t been the result of gametogenesis. A clone was still bad. It made his stomach flip to think that he was pregnant with himself, and he was sure he’d come up with a freaking book’s worth of existential nightmares to lose sleep over. But for the moment, he was just glad he didn’t have to think about the coefficient of inbreeding in relation to himself anymore.

The Eridian made a noise of affirmation and then sang a few notes which must have been Eridian for cloning. “You may be interested to know we are also in the process of cultivating a cell line derived from your muscles in order to establish a supply of laboratory-grown meat for your consumption.”

“Why couldn’t it have been just that!?” Grace demanded. “Why did you have to clone me!? What possible reason could you have to make a clone of me?”

“To put it shortly, for the good of Eridian society. I saw a flaw in the collective consciousness of Erid. I am seeking to correct it.”

Grace just stared at the pink Eridian.

“Let me explain in more detail,” The pink Eridian said. “You’ve probably realized this for yourself, but the reason I’m the one telling you all of this is because although this project was a collaboration requiring the approval and action of several Thrums, the idea to clone you was originally mine. I’ve been the liaison between all Thrums involved in achieving successful gestation. Although Thrums do not operate with the same hierarchical structure you may be used to on the planet Earth, you can consider me to carry the most responsibility for it.”

“Gee. Thanks.”

The pink Eridian didn’t react to Grace’s bitter sarcasm. “I noticed this flaw in our collective consciousness when I first visited you. I was accompanied by other members of the Navigation Thrum. I wanted to enter your room to speak with you. When I expressed this desire to my colleagues, they reacted with disrespect toward you. They felt it was strange to want to get close to you. They felt your appearance was disturbing. They regarded you in much the way we regard a foreign animal in captivity. Something exotic and exciting that you can be proud that you own. Do you remember I told you the Thrum speculated you might have brain damage? I apologize for presenting it as such, but it was not a joke.”

Grace felt as though he was slowly deflating. He had noticed it before too, hadn’t he? The worst of that attitude had come from that doctor who tried to give him his first vaginal examination. But he’d already seen enough of it from other Eridians that he’d known almost immediately what the doctor was doing.

…And he had noticed that hardly any of his visitors entered his room. He had told himself that they probably didn’t want to risk exposure to his atmosphere. He had told himself xenonite suits were probably difficult to make.

The pink Eridian laced their fingers together. “We are going to establish relations with Earth. We are going to be friends with humanity. We cannot afford to see you as animals. For the good of both of our people, Erid must learn to love humanity the same way Rocky loves you.”

Grace’s heart stuttered in his chest for a moment hearing another Eridian acknowledge Rocky’s affection for him.

“Erid is extremely, extremely fortunate that our first human ambassador is a shining example of his species. We are fortunate that you have saved us and our star and our planet. Erid already loves you. But we cannot love you as a pet. We must love you as a person. And so we must know you. The more of you that exist, the more Eridians whose minds you can change. The more of them you can convince to come into your habitat to shake your hand. You will do the work, and your clone will do the work.”

“You do know the clone isn’t me, right? It has my genetic code, but that’s it. It wouldn’t be me.”

“That’s correct. But they will be enough like you. And they will be your child…”

Grace flinched like he’d been struck.

“...And that’s good in its own way.” The Eridian paused and tapped the ground. “...I understand you’re in distress.”

“No, you don’t,” Grace muttered. He was shaking and his glasses were beginning to fog up. “You have no idea what you did to me. Me, personally.”

“You’re correct. I don’t. Not in the way you mean.”

Grace looked over. The pink Eridian had their fingers laced together. 

“Reproduction for Eridians is very different from reproduction for humans,” they said, a wistful note in their voice. “I have tried to understand the cultural attachments to various kinds of human pregnancy. Intended, unintended, unmarried, as a single parent, as the result of a violent assault. I’ve tried to understand your unique circumstances and how your gender might influence your experiences and your perceptions. But the fact remains that I am not of Earth. I am Eridian. I cannot understand what this is like for you.

“Eridians lay eggs together, which fuse and then hatch. We are unable to conceptualize carrying a child inside our bodies. We do not give birth, so we don’t know the pain and the effort and the danger. Our young are able to walk and learn language nearly as soon as they hatch. We cannot know what it is to parent something as soft and as helpless as a human infant. All I know is what I’ve studied, and that is inadequate.”

Rocky knows, Grace nearly said.

But did he? Did he really? At that moment, he was probably at home with Adrian. Maybe he was fast asleep or maybe he was counting the seconds until he was safe to return to Grace. But he’d walked away from it. Grace had no doubt he was still upset and terrified and outraged on Grace’s behalf. But he could walk away from it. No matter where Grace could go, he’d be dragging around a body that didn’t feel like it belonged to him any more. An exhausted, swollen, too-soft body which wasn’t him and wasn’t ever supposed to be him. 

He didn’t begrudge Rocky. The last thing he wanted was for Rocky to feel as violated or as alien as he did.

“I understand autonomy is greatly important to humans of your culture,” the pink Eridian said. “I understand bodily autonomy is even more important. I understand you are deeply disturbed and profoundly distressed. I sincerely apologize for this. We kept knowledge of our plans from you in order to minimize your distress. I am explaining everything to you now in order to minimize further distress.”

“And because you knew I’d say no, right?” Grace said, but as soon as the words escaped him he knew that hadn’t been a consideration at all, because—

“Your consent was not necessary,” the pink Eridian said. “We would have proceeded with the project whether you consented or not.”

“Yeah,” Grace murmured. “Because the mission is more important. I’ve been here before.”

“That’s correct. Our goals are more important.”

“This is— this is—” Grace stood up, outrage building. “You’re full of crap, you know that? You say you want Eridians not to treat me like a pet or an animal, but you’re doing exactly that, making decisions for me about my life, my body! It’s like I’m not even human to you.”

“I am not treating you like a human, that is true. I am treating you like an Eridian.”

Below them, the waves rolled gently onto the beach. The artificial wind rippled through Grace’s hair, and although his face and his hands felt numb, his belly was a burning weight at the center of his being. Standing up, he was aware of how Erid’s gravity pulled at it, and it sat heavily between his hips.

There had never been any escape for him. Running hadn’t been able to save him before, and it couldn’t save him now. He was always a thing to be used. A means to an end. Maybe that was what he was meant to be all along. Maybe he was never a real person at all.

“I want to reassure you that we are not unreasonable,” the pink Eridian said. “We are not going to force you to interact or cohabit with your clone. Once it’s born, we can take it away and you never have to see it again if you don’t want to.”

A sudden stab of sick emotion seized Grace’s heart. “...What?”

“We have a separate habitat set aside. A team of Eridian caretakers will raise the clone without your involvement. You can have as much or as little access as you wish—”

“Are you insane!?” Grace interrupted. “You are, you’re insane, aren’t you!? You have no idea what you’re doing. It— it— you can’t just stick a baby in a box and only touch it through xenonite suits and expect it won’t go crazy. You’ll ruin it! It’ll die of misery!”

“We have accounted for this. We are preparing the psychological—”

“No, you have no idea. When you said you couldn’t conceptualize what you’ve done to me, you’re doing the exact same thing but worse. A million times worse. It’ll be a disaster. Humans have done experiments with, with baby monkeys, and wire and cloth, and we can’t even do that to monkeys anymore it’s so unethical, and now you want to do that with a human child!? You’re insane! You’re evil!”

The pink Eridian folded their hands. “You have not been touched except through xenonite since you left Earth and you’re just fine.”

Grace reared back and punched the Eridian. His fist bounced off a Xenonite seam and split his knuckles open. He cried out and pulled his hand back, cradling it close to his chest and hissing in pain.

The pink Eridian made a noise of curiosity. “If you feel that strongly, you could raise the child yourself.”

“Go fly a kite,” Grace hissed. He had the impulse to hit them again, but it had been a really stupid thing to do the first time. He might’ve broken a finger.

“In any case, I wish you hadn’t done that. I’ll have to send in a doctor to take care of that for you.”

“No. No. You stay away from me. You and everyone else. No one else is ever coming into my home again without my permission. No one is ever touching me again…”

He choked on his words. The pink Eridian couldn’t physically look at him, but the way they were holding themself told Grace that they both knew Grace’s protests didn’t matter at all. They were simply being nice in not acknowledging the obvious.

“I will let you be for now, Doctor Grace,” the pink Eridian said, running their hand up and down their arm. “Please know I’m always available for anything you may wish to discuss.”

They lumbered off down the hill. Grace tried to turn around, thinking he would refuse to watch them go out of spite, but his anxiety ratched up and his heart pounded and he had to look anyway just so he could be sure they were really going.

Even after they were gone he had the persistent, paranoid sense that they were still there, watching him.

Researching second-trimester abortions was really depressing. Among all the media and all the databases Stratt had pirated, Grace was looking for medical texts but found personal accounts far more frequently. It seemed like the only people who actually wrote about or discussed second-trimester abortions were people who’d received devastating diagnoses and were grieving the loss of a deeply wanted baby.

It made Grace feel a little sick. He had to take frequent breaks while he was on the computer.

He was exploring his options. He was trying to make a plan. It would help if he knew exactly what was possible for him.

No doctor would help him get an abortion. He knew that much without even asking. It would be up to him.

…He didn’t think Rocky would help him, either. It tore at his heart and made him feel more alone than he had ever felt in his entire life. 

The first time Rocky had come to visit him again after his talk with the pink Eridian, Grace had explained everything that had happened.

“A clone?” Rocky echoed. “It’s a clone of you?”

“Yeah. It’s so messed up.” Grace was running a hand through his hair, tugging on it. It was an anxious tic he’d developed lately.

Rocky was quiet.

“Buddy? What’s up? I don’t really like the look you’re giving me.”

“I’m just thinking,” Rocky said. “It is messed up.” He paused, then added, “It also makes it… a little more real. Knowing what it is.”

“More real? What do you mean by that?”

“No. It’s nothing. Forget I said anything.”

That was when Grace knew with absolute certainty that if it managed to be born, Rocky would be visiting the little Grace-clone in whatever box they locked it in, just like he visited Grace.

Rocky must have perceived the betrayal on Grace’s face. “Grace. I’m here for you. Always here for you. You are my first priority.”

Grace knew that was true. So he didn’t even know why he was upset. It wasn’t like he had a monopoly on Rocky’s consideration. Rocky was allowed to do whatever he wanted.

…No. He knew why he was upset. It was because he had already known Rocky would turn him down if he asked for help, but he thought it would have been because he didn’t want to risk hurting Grace or maiming Grace or killing Grace with a botched abortion. He still thought even now that that would be the biggest reason Rocky would turn him down. 

But now he knew that if he asked Rocky for help, he’d turn him down in some small part because he cared about Grace’s clone. Rocky wanted there to be another little Grace on Erid. Maybe Rocky was thinking about Grace’s short human lifespan, thinking about how by the time Old Grace was at the end of his life, New Grace would be an adult. Maybe Rocky was hoping he wouldn’t ever have to say goodbye to Grace.

It wouldn’t be Grace as he knew him.

But Grace couldn’t forget the words of the pink Eridian. It would be his child. Maybe that would be enough for Rocky.

So he would be on his own for the abortion. If he managed to work up the courage to do it at all.

He read that on Earth, something called a laminaria stick was used to dilate the cervix during second trimester abortions. He didn’t have anything like that, but he found that if he dehydrated a certain food goop of his into short, thin sticks, they were hard and expanded to several times their size when they absorbed moisture. There were about a million problems with sticking an unsterilized food product in his vagina, but he was desperate and he had bigger things to worry about.

He sat in front of the mirror with his underwear off. He had Rocky’s homemade speculum inside of him, and he was trying to see his cervix. 

He needed more light. He got a flashlight and came back.

Now there was a glare on the glass. He switched the flashlight off with a frustrated groan.

He had a dehydrated food stick in his fingers. He tried to put it inside him, but he couldn’t figure out how to hold his hand so that he could see what he was doing. 

He tried to feel. The food stick scraped something inside of him that hurt, and he flinched.

He had no idea what he was doing. He didn’t think he could reach far enough inside of himself, and he had no idea how he’d even get the crummy stick inside his cervix even if he could.

He poked, and poked again, ow, and poked again, ow. He was gonna give himself an infection or something if he kept this up. He poked again. OW.

Grace ripped his hand away and threw the food stick against the mirror. He pulled the speculum out and wrapped his arms around his legs and told himself it hadn’t been a serious attempt anyway. He’d brainstorm new ideas and think of something else.

He hadn’t been able to think of anything else. The sun rose and Grace thought and experimented and cried and thought some more and the sun set and he wasn’t any closer to having an answer.

Rocky came over. Rocky was great. Grace curled up in Rocky’s arms and cried and cried while Rocky petted his back and promised everything would be alright in the end. This would be over eventually.

He only really ate when Rocky fed him and only slept when Rocky cajoled him into bed and sat right next to him and vibrated with some soft and low Eridian lullaby that sat right at the edge of Grace’s range of hearing.

He loved Rocky and he needed Rocky, but the pregnancy was a giant boulder between them and Grace hated feeling so very alone even when Rocky was right next to him.

Then Rocky would leave, and Grace would be on his own again to think and experiment and sob and stare at himself in the mirror as the thing inside him grew bigger and bigger.

The days were passing. The weeks were passing. He had to figure this out, and soon.

The doctors were still coming every day. Grace never let them in. Used to his moods by now, they left when asked and just came back later.

Grace held no illusions that they actually respected his wishes. He knew they would force their way in if they wanted to, or if they were ordered to.

So he wasn't very surprised one day when he refused to open the door and the doctor on the other side said, “I’m sorry, Savior Grace, but it’s been over a month since anyone last examined you. This examination will happen today.”

The lock clicked open and the doctor entered flanked by two big Eridians, and Grace froze, every instinct telling him to run. He wanted to jump through the window even though the xenonite wouldn’t break like glass. He wanted to throw something at the guards even though he knew he couldn’t stun them or even slow them down. He wanted to run down the beach and climb the rainbow and wake up somewhere else, anywhere else.

The doctor and the two guards stood in front of him. The doctor said, “How will we be proceeding, Savior Grace?”

Grace swallowed. He was so sick of feeling like a cornered fox.

“Just do it quickly,” he muttered, and he laid down on the couch and the doctor got to work. When they pulled out the needle with which to draw Grace’s blood, Grace flinched and was surprised it didn’t find its way into his neck.

When it was over, the three Eridians left as quickly and as quietly as they came. Grace waited until he was sure they were gone, then he went outside for some fresh air.

“You know, everyone is very worried about you,” the pink Eridian said.

Grace jumped, nearly screaming. Then he whirled around. “Go away! I don’t care what you have to say, just go away!”

“I will,” the pink Eridian said. “But would you humor me a bit and listen to me?”

Grace tugged at his hair. “...Fine. Whatever. You’ll just do what you want no matter what I have to say about it.”

The pink Eridian sat down in the same spot they’d been at for their previous conversation. Grace didn’t move. The Eridian waited a moment, and when Grace still didn’t move, they began to speak.

“A Thrum was held last night regarding your wellbeing. The consensus was that there is much reason to be concerned for your mental health and your physical health.”

Grace remained silent.

The pink Eridian crossed their arms delicately. “Is there anything I can do to make this easier on you? If there’s anything that can be done within reason, I’ll ensure that it’s done.”

“It’s kinda late for you to start feeling bad about this.”

“I’ve always felt bad. You don’t have to believe me, but it’s the truth. I admire you very much, Doctor Grace. I’m terribly sad we will never be friends after this.”

Grace just shook his head. There wasn’t anything else he felt he could say.

After another moment of silence, the pink Eridian stood. “I’ll take my leave, then. If I think of anything that might make things better, I’ll let you know.”

They began to leave. Then they paused, something almost thoughtful about their stance.

“...In truth, I hadn’t anticipated you’d react quite as badly as you did. I thought you liked children.”

Then they ambled down the hill, leaving Grace speechless.

It was lucky that Rocky wasn’t around the first time Grace was sure he felt the baby move. He would have scared Rocky very badly otherwise.

He’d been out for a walk on the beach. Just to get out of the house and just for a little bit of a change of scenery. He’d actually wanted to take a run, but his fatigue was getting worse and he didn’t quite have the energy. But a walk was still nice. Walking meant he could skip stones. He’d gotten pretty good at it lately, twisting his wrist just right so he could consistently get three or four or sometimes even five little skips before the stone sank.

He’d pluck a rock, toss it. Plip-plip-plip-plip.

Pluck a rock, toss it. Plip-plip-plip.

Pluck a rock, toss it. Plip-plip-plip-plip-plip.

The next time he picked up a rock, he was about to toss it when there was a little flutter inside of him.

Plop. His toss was messed up and instead of skipping, the rock dropped into the water.

He paused, standing absolutely still. A few seconds later, he felt a slightly stronger movement that somehow felt purposeful.

He had known this would happen if he couldn’t figure things out quickly enough. He’d known, and so he’d told himself he couldn’t let things get this far.

But here he was.

It wasn’t even as if movement meant anything, scientifically. The fetus was barely more developed today than it was yesterday. Grace knew that. 

But he was also just human, and he had just felt the baby move. A line had been crossed, a door shut, and Rocky had probably said it best a few weeks ago when he said it was a little more real now.

It was real. He was stuck like this.

Grace dropped the rocks he’d been carrying. He started walking back toward the house.

After a few steps, he found the energy to run. He ran across the beach and up the hill, and when he reached the path leading to his door, he took a right instead of a left. He ran as far up the rocks as he could, and when they became craggy and uneven, he nearly climbed in places, heaving himself along with his hands and his feet where he had to.

Soon he was standing at the crest of the rock arch that stretched out into his ocean. His chest was heaving and he was full of adrenaline.

In his youth, he’d had passing nightmares of being stuck like this. The opposite of everything he wanted to be. A damnation that would forever steal his self. A mutilation for the world to see, and so for the world to know he was a fake, a liar, just a silly girl playing pretend but never able to escape biology. And everyone who had hated what he was would be right, and Grace would never prove them wrong.

He could end the nightmare here. He could end it before it went any further. He would just plop into the water and the shock of the cold would make him sink like a stone. It would be easy. Maybe even painless. At least less painful than shoving an instrument inside of himself and perforating his organs.

His feet didn’t move. This high up, just like on Earth, the wind ripped at him and his clothes billowed, tighter on him than they had ever been before. If he didn’t jump now, he never would. He knew he wouldn’t.

He told himself he would be a lab rat. He was worse than stuck, worse than a mutilated thing, he was just a toy for the Eridians. A plaything for them to do whatever they wanted with. They weren’t ever going to let him have the sort of life he’d fought for on Earth. He would never be free. He would never be himself again.

And the baby. If he thought about it as a baby. It made him light-headed to do so, but he had to consider it, too. It would grow up in laboratories, raised to do what the Eridians trained it to do. It wouldn’t have anything approaching the life a human ought to have. Jumping would be a mercy.

He stared down the ocean and the thought reverberated through his head. A mercy. A mercy.

…What would Rocky say if he could see Grace now?

He didn’t jump. The thought of Rocky stayed him. Rocky’s devastation, Rocky’s grief. Had he worked so hard to bring Grace to Erid just for Grace to throw it all away?

For every reason he had to jump, each second he lingered brought another reason why he couldn’t. Rocky was foremost in his mind, but more and more reasons sparked in him. He’d never get to taste the meat that was being grown just for him. He’d never get to sleep in again, or read a book again, or walk along the beach that was just below him again.

He sank to his knees. The sharp rock below dug into him, and he gave a soft grunt of pain. He even wanted to feel pain again. He wanted to be in pain for the rest of his life.

And his thoughts of sparing the baby a lifetime as a lab rat in a cage. Would it be so bad? Wasn’t it more likely they’d give it the same sort of habitat Grace had? Would it really be so miserable?

…Yes. Yes, it would be miserable. Because no matter what creature comforts they gave it, a human child just couldn’t be happy without the touch of other humans.

But he still wouldn’t jump. Wouldn’t, couldn’t.

Grace knew what he was doing by then. He was reaching for justifications not to kill himself because when he searched deep in his soul, it turned out he was the same puny, pitiful coward who had tried to doom humanity so he could have a few more decades scrabbling for survival on a slowly-freezing planet.

He tugged his hair and started to cry, which wasn’t anything new for him. But this time, he wasn’t crying because of something that had been done to him but because of what he was. He couldn’t run from that, just like he couldn’t run from Stratt.

A couple of hours later, Rocky swung by. He asked why Grace was all stinky and sweaty (Grace had once made the mistake of telling Rocky that humans produced body odor which worsened when they sweat and Rocky had never let him forget it) and Grace told him he’d just been on a run.

Rocky did jazz hands. “Good! Glad to see you taking care of yourself!”

So he wasn’t going to kill himself, and he wasn’t going to give himself an abortion. It was time to get real; neither of those had ever actually been options.

Which meant the clone was going to be born, which meant he had to endure the rest of his pregnancy.

There was a strange sort of relief that came with having the illusion of choice torn away. He sort of wondered if this was how all pregnant people felt, even the ones who’d wanted their pregnancies. If he thought about it, he sort of felt there was probably an element of coercion to all pregnancies. If a couple wanted a baby and purposely tried for a baby and one of them wound up pregnant, was there really any point at which the pregnant partner could change their mind without imploding their entire life? Maybe very early on, if their partner was particularly understanding, but that was definitely a door that shut fast and shut hard.

The pink Eridian had been right; pregnancy wasn’t something a person could really understand until they had been pregnant. Grace wondered what all those people felt, the ones who thought they knew what they wanted and only realized with dawning horror what the reality was like once they were trapped in sore, leaking bodies they didn’t recognize anymore.

At least Grace was better off than them. He knew exactly where he stood, and he knew there wasn’t anything he could do about it. 

Once he’d made peace with it (and once he’d decided not to examine too closely whether he actually had made peace with it or not) he found it was weirdly easy to finally start thinking about the clone as a baby. He’d had a purposeful sort of mental block up before his suicide attempt, only internally referring to it as a fetus or a clone when he’d been pretending he had the ability to give himself an abortion. He still cringed to think that he was going to have a baby, but there wasn’t that same discomfort about thinking about the clone as a baby. It was going to be a baby. He might as well get used to it.

There was one choice he still had to make. Now that the baby was going to be born, he had to decide whether he was going to let the Eridians go ahead with their idiotic, unethical, insane plan on how they were going to raise it.

There was an obvious choice. He didn’t want to make the obvious choice.

What sort of dad would he be after enduring such an awful pregnancy to a child he hadn’t wanted? Probably not a good dad.

But he would probably at least be a competent dad. He liked kids. He was good with them. He didn’t have the same experience with small kids the way he had with early adolescents, but he figured the same things that made a person good with older kids also generally applied to younger kids. Speaking to them like they were real human beings with real emotions. Keeping them entertained. Playing to their interests.

And when all was said and done, Grace would have to be a really, really, really bad dad for the kid to have been better off with the Eridians.

One day Rocky was over. They were playing Minecraft. Rocky was a lot of fun to play Minecraft with because he always helped Grace improve his redstone mechanisms to be more efficient, and whenever he needed to reduce his hunger in-game, he’d chant gross gross gross gross gross over the eating sound effect.

Rocky was off looking for a new cave to mine. Grace was expanding his house. He placed his bed, then moved it, then moved it again, then asked, “Do you think I should keep it?”

“You need a bed. We’re too far from spawn.”

“Not the bed. The baby.”

Rocky was so taken aback, he walked his character into a chasm and died. “…I don’t think I can make that decision for you.”

“I’m not asking you to, buddy. I just wanna talk it out. Try to figure out how I’m feeling.”

Rocky gave a doubtful grumble and shut down their world. “If you wanted to figure out how you’re feeling, you’d ask a different question. Ask how I think your life would change either way. Or ask if I think you can handle it.”

That last bit sort of implied that Rocky might not think Grace could handle it, and that kinda hurt. But he had to concede that Rocky had a point; maybe he couldn’t handle it.

“Okay, but, like… if you were gonna have an opinion…?”

Rocky rolled a shoulder in an approximation of a shrug. “I think you’re likely the very first being in the universe to find yourself in your position. It’s unprecedented. I think it’s hard to know what the correct answer is, both in the broader scope of the situation and how it applies to you, personally.”

“See? That’s already really helpful,” Grace said. “Because, um, I was kinda thinking there was definitely a right answer.”

Rocky perked up in interest. 

“Yeah, um…” Grace shook out his hands, trying to release some nervous energy. “…but it’s kinda not what I want to do.”

“How sure are you of that?”

“...I don’t know. Sort of. Not very.”

“You have time to think about it.”

“Not a lot of time. And I don’t think I’m gonna get much closer to a resolution thinking the way I am.”

“What would you do if it was one of your students coming to you with this problem?”

Grace laughed softly. “If one of my middle-schoolers was pregnant on an alien planet and had to either raise the baby or leave it to be essentially tortured to death? That’s not something that’s covered in the teacher’s handbook.”

Grace picked at his controller.

“...I’d tell her to do what’s right for herself,” Grace muttered, looking down.

He wasn’t really satisfied with that answer for himself, though. In Rocky’s hypothetical, acting in the role of a teacher, his priority would have to be his student’s welfare. But as a parent? Everyone knew that a parent’s priority needed to be their child.

And he was going to be a parent in at least some capacity, even if only in the capacity of birthgiver. He already felt a nebulous sort of responsibility for the baby that he couldn’t fully conceptualize yet. He didn’t think he would like who he was as a person if he felt no responsibility at all.

Rocky tapped his fingers together. “That doesn’t appear to have helped you.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so.”

“What if it was one of your students?”

Grace lifted his head, squinting a little. “You literally just asked that.”

“Grace. What if it was one of your students?”

Grace’s stomach twisted. It had been nearly a decade for him since he had seen any of his last class, but he could still remember them all so clearly. Olivia and Rekha and Parker and Abby and Trang and Theresa and Micheal and Harrison and Tamora and Luther and Tracy and all the rest. Back before he had even ever heard of the Petrova line, he had always nursed a weird little dream about having a student who was a runaway or something, or got removed from their home and needed a temporary place to stay. In this dream, Grace would step up and take them in and become something between a mentor and a cool uncle to the kid and totally turn their life around. And then down the road the kid would go to MIT or Julliard or some other equally impressive school and send Grace post cards crediting him as the reason any of it was possible.

What if that kid needed more than a mentor and a cool uncle? What if they needed someone to change their diapers, and teach them how to read, and tuck them in at night?

What if they needed someone to love them?

Grace loaded their Minecraft world back up. Rocky must have sensed that Grace didn’t really want to talk about it any more, so he just quietly walked his character back to the chasm where he’d died so he could collect the items he’d dropped.

After a while, Grace said, “Hey Rocky, can I ask you to do me an unpleasant favor?”

Rocky was in the middle of pouring lava on Grace’s house as a funny joke, so he rolled his shoulder again. “Guess I owe you one. What is it?”

“Can you ask that Eridian in the Navigation Thrum to come by and talk to me tomorrow?”

Rocky shivered. “Disproportionate retribution for my crimes. I want to defecate on their feet.”

“C’mon.”

“Fine, fine.”

The next day, Rocky escorted the pink Eridian to Grace’s house. Grace was already waiting for them, sitting on the rock.

The pink Eridian pushed their legs together in greeting. “Thank you for inviting me into your dome, Doctor Grace. I’m honored to be in your presence once more.”

Grace refrained from rolling his eyes. “You lied to me.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“You said you wouldn’t keep any more secrets from me. The intention was for me to raise the clone all along, wasn’t it?”

The pink Eridian tapped the ground. “Our intention? Not quite. Our preference? I won’t deny that. All information we have access to indicates a human infant being raised by a human parent would undoubtedly have better outcomes by nearly any measure. You mentioned as much yourself.”

“But you weren’t going to force me?”

“No. It wasn’t necessary in this instance.”

Grace slowly let out a breath, looking out over the ocean. So this was genuinely his own choice.

Or as much as his own choice as it was possible for it to be. He wondered how much of his own choice it ever really could be after reading so many stories about heartbreaking TFMRs and after a lifetime of absorbing societal messaging about what a parent should be and even while his own hormones were hijacking his body and rewiring his brain. An evolutionary gift or a curse hard-coded into his DNA to ensure parents loved their children enough to not let humanity die out.

“...The last time I saw you, you asked if there was anything you could do to make things easier on me.”

“Did you think of anything?”

“...Yeah.” Grace rubbed his hands together. “If I’m gonna do this, I have some… conditions.”

“By all means.”

“First off, I don’t want an Eridian doctor touching me ever again. If I need anything— examinations, procedures, medication dispensed, whatever— I want Armando doing it. That’s the medical robot from the Hail Mary. I want him brought into my dome and installed in my house. If he doesn’t fit, do whatever it takes to modify my house to make him fit.”

“I’m certain we can install your robot in your home and have it perform a large amount of your medical care. I don’t believe I can promise you that no Eridian doctor will ever touch you again. If you’re in need of something your robot can’t provide, or in an emergency situation, we may have no choice but to utilize Eridian doctors.”

“...Then I want Rocky vetting every Eridian who might end up on my care team before they ever get the chance to touch me. If he doesn’t approve of them, they get replaced with someone he does approve of. Can you do that for me, Rocky?”

Rocky tilted his carapace in a pseudo-nod. “Yes. Of course.”

“We should be able to make that work,” the pink Eridian said.

“Okay. Second,” Grace said, “I get absolute control over everything concerning the clone. I get to decide what it eats. I get to decide how I deliver it. I get to provide it the education I deem appropriate. Everything all the way until it’s old enough to make its own decisions, and then that’s exactly what it’s gonna do. Make its own decisions.”

“The purpose of the clone’s creation was to work in order to foster friendship between humans and Eridians. They will have to perform this work. I’m afraid that’s non-negotiable.”

“Then that doesn’t happen until I say they’re old enough for it. And you’re gonna give them as much freedom as you possibly can.”

“When will you say they’re old enough? I’d like to set a specific age. The age of majority seems fair. I believe in your part of the world, that’s eighteen years.”

“Eighteen Earth years.”

“Yes, that is what I meant. Eighteen Earth years.”

“Lastly.” Grace gestured at his belly. “I am never ever doing this again.”

The pink Eridian tapped their fingers in consideration. “You drive a hard bargain.”

Nobody spoke for several long seconds. The only sound was the soft roar of the waves beneath them.

“Very well,” the pink Eridian eventually said. “I accept your conditions.”

Grace let out a shuddering sigh. Rocky sagged in relief.

“I’d also like to offer something else,” The pink Eridian said. Grace stiffened, and when they perceived this, they raised their hands. “No, no, nothing bad. Yours to accept or decline with no conditions attached to it. It was simply an idea I had which I thought would be beneficial not just to you, but also your clone and the rest of Erid as well.”

“That really sounds too good to be true,” Grace said slowly. “On Earth we have a saying about people who try to sell bridges.”

“This isn’t that. I am offering you a job. The Navigation Thrum would like you to teach science to Eridian children.

Grace’s breath left him in a rush while Rocky trilled loudly. “...What?”

“Your clone will need friends and playmates close to their own level of maturity, and it would otherwise be difficult for them to meet other children while living in your dome. What better way to introduce them to Eridian children than by sending them to school?” The pink Eridian said. “And the Eridian children would meet you, and learn from you, and love you the same way your students on Earth loved you.”

There was no need for the pink Eridian to point out the benefit to Grace. He would be a teacher again. He would have something to be passionate about again. He would do something meaningful again.

“No strings attached?” Grace asked.

“That’s correct.”

“You’re not just gonna take my job away from me if I do something you don’t like?”

“I believe that’s called being fired, and I believe that’s not an unusual thing to happen when an employee does something their employer doesn’t like. But no. I can’t foresee any circumstance in which it would serve my goals to use your class to manipulate you. There probably isn’t any reason you would lose your job other than for issues relating to job performance.”

Rocky was positively vibrating and clearly trying to stifle it. Grace suspected he didn’t want the pink Eridian to know he was so pleased about one of their ideas.

“...I couldn’t start until after I deliver,” Grace said.

“Of course. You would be able to start whenever you feel ready, with as many classes as you want. We can discuss the logistics at a later date.”

And then the pink Eridian offered a farewell on their arm and went on their way.

Rocky practically exploded. “Teaching! You’ll be a teacher again! Finally, something going right for you!”

“...Yeah, I guess so.”

Rocky immediately stilled. “You aren’t happy?”

“No, no. I mean, yes, I am. I’m really happy. I just—”

Grace sucked in a breath and put a hand on his belly. He’d been in the habit of avoiding even looking at it for so long, it felt strange to touch it. “...I don’t think it would’ve been offered if this hadn’t happened.”

“Why do you say that?”

“...It felt almost like an apology.”

Rocky kind of drooped, and Grace felt bad about bumming him out, so he took Rocky back inside and loaded Minecraft up again, telling him all about how back on Earth, some teachers would use Minecraft to teach basic engineering concepts to their students. Rocky told him he should do that too, and Grace said he wondered how long it would take him to get fired if he just played video games with his students all day every day.

Days passed. Weeks passed. Grace couldn’t perceive the way his belly must have been growing day by day, but it continued to grow all the same.

His newly Rocky-Approved care team were scrambling to prepare for the clone’s birth. Grace had already told them he had absolutely no intention of chestfeeding, so they were hard at work perfecting a baby formula.

They were also preparing the room in which Grace would give birth. He’d wanted to do it at home with only Armando and Rocky there, but he’d already been informed that wouldn’t be possible. In the event that both he and the baby needed urgent medical attention immediately after birth, Armando wouldn’t be able to treat two people simultaneously. 

There was also the complicating factor that he wanted a caesarean. Armando had been perfectly competent so far at handling Grace’s ultrasounds and medication, but even Grace had to reluctantly admit that it wouldn’t be a good idea to test Armando’s surgical capabilities with any procedure as long or involved as a c-section.

Rocky hadn’t been in love with the idea of Grace getting major surgery when it wasn’t strictly necessary. Grace just loaded up the sort of natural birth video his students would’ve watched in their health class and left Rocky alone with the laptop for ten minutes while he ate cereal. By the time he came back, Rocky was sitting in the corner, shivering and asking what evolutionary sense it made for reproduction to be screamingly painful. Rocky warmed up to the idea of cutting a big hole into Grace after that.

“Y’know, chestfeeding hurts too,” Grace said through a mouthful of imitation oats and vaguely milk-flavored nutritional soup. “Even worse than birth. Excruciating. ‘S why I’m getting these chopped off first chance I get.”

“Mean. I work very hard to understand gender and dysphoria and how your leaky bits are different from other humans’ leaky bits and you mock me by telling lies.”

“You say you work so hard, but you’re still talking about my leaky bits. I’m really hurt right now.”

Honestly, Rocky was the only reason he was getting through the realities of his new existence with his sanity mostly intact. Rocky was the one who distracted him with movies and video games and gossip about which of their siblings Adrian was beefing with that week. Rocky was the one serving as intermediary between Grace and all the Eridians they both hated but who were directly responsible for keeping Grace alive.

Rocky was there on the day that Grace caught sight of himself in his mirror and realized, oh, he actually looked pregnant. The last time he’d been aware of how he looked, he’d known he’d had a belly, of course. But it was the sort of thing where he might’ve just been getting fat.

There really wasn’t any denying it anymore. The shape of it, the distinct swell and curve, were obvious now.

He hadn’t even said anything about it, he just stopped and stared at himself, and Rocky was watching. And when Rocky left that day, he took the mirror with him. He didn’t even need to ask, he just knew.

He was into the third trimester now. There wasn’t much longer to go.

“Hey Rocky,” Grace said one day shortly after the mirror disappeared. “It’s kicking.”

It moved a lot these days. It was getting stronger.

Rocky’s carapace lifted. “You can feel it moving inside you? Sounds freaky.”

“Yeah, it’s weird. Humans can’t feel a lot of what goes on inside our bodies, but we can feel certain things. You remember when I told you humans can feel when we have gas bubbles in our digestive tract? This feels a little like that, but stronger and the sensation doesn’t travel.”

The sensation sort of made Grace want to tear off his own skin. It was easier to deal with if he viewed it as an interesting science thing he could share with Rocky.

“Of course I remember,” Rocky said. “Why would I ever want to forget disgusting human gas facts?” But he didn’t actually look all that grossed-out. “Can you feel it from the outside too?”

“Probably. Wanna find out?”

Rocky’s carapace lifted even further. “…You’re okay with it?”

Grace huffed a breath and nodded. “I mean. I think so. It’s you, Rock. You’re gonna be this kid’s godfather… or something.”

“What’s that?”

“Uh, a human tradition. When a baby’s born, the parents choose godparents for the baby. A long time ago it just meant they were in charge of the baby’s religious education as they grew up. But nowadays where I’m from, it’s usually… a close friend of the parents who they trust to help in raising the kid. It’s a way of making someone outside of the family honorary kin to the baby.”

Rocky went still. Grace was starting to worry that maybe he’d overstepped when—

“Do you mean it?” Rocky’s soft song made Grace’s mouth go dry.

“Of course, Rock.” Grace could feel his smile wobbling on his face. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. Why wouldn’t I want you to be part of this, too?”

The noise Rocky made wobbled like Grace’s smile. “…I don’t have the words. I’m honored.”

“So do you want to feel? Before it decides to go back to sleep?”

Rocky approached almost cautiously. He tapped Grace’s belly with a single finger.

“…Can hear the baby now past all your blood and other fluids. They’re floating in their own fluids…” Rocky said. Then he laid his hand flat on Grace’s belly. 

“It was kicking closer to here. Up and to your left…”

Rocky moved his hand. After a few moments, the baby softly thumped again. Rocky’s body seemed to thump with it. “Do they know I’m here?”

“I don’t know. But I guess it’s possible. I’ve heard that babies can learn to recognize voices they hear in utero. Some people talk to babies before they’re born.”

Grace hadn’t done that yet. But he wanted Rocky to.

Rocky tapped his belly again. “…Hello little Grace-clone.” Then he went quiet for a few minutes, probably as he tried to think of something to say.

Eventually, he said, “Is it bad that I love you already?”

“What? Rocky, no.” Grace said. “Of course not. That’s why I’m keeping it, right? Because human babies need love, a-and soft things, and a real family. That’s the whole point. I want you to love them.”

“That’s not entirely what I…” Rocky’s voice suddenly died

“What?”

“It’s nothing.”

“No, what do you mean?”

“It’s nothing having to do with you. Don’t worry about it. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“If you tell me not to worry, I’m only gonna worry harder. C’mon Rocky, what’s wrong?”

Rocky backed up a few steps. “…Adrian and I have been having difficulties.”

Grace’s eyes widened. “What? Oh no, Rocky, that’s horrible! Why didn’t you want to tell me?”

Rocky shuffled uncomfortably.

Grace’s stomach dropped. “It… it doesn’t have anything to do with me, does it?”

“It’s not your fault.” Rocky emphasized his words with such strong staccato that Grace felt it in his teeth. “It isn’t anything that you’ve done. It’s all me. Adrian has been pushing for us to start a family, and the timing isn’t right for me.”

Grace was suddenly sure he had an understanding of what the problem was, and it was definitely because of him. Rocky was spending hours every day with Grace. And when he wasn’t with Grace, he was attending meetings about Grace or Thrumming about Grace or managing Grace’s care teams for Grace. He almost certainly didn’t have any time left over for his family. If he and Adrian were to have any children, he would have to cut back a good chunk of what he was doing for Grace for their sake.

And Grace had just asked Rock to be even more involved and help raise his clone baby and Rocky had said he would be honored to do so.

Oh, jeez, Adrian was gonna poison his drinking water.

Rocky must have been able to see the self-blame settling on Grace’s face, for he stomped a few feet and said, “My choices. Adrian is angry at me for my own choices. Not anything you’re responsible for.”

“Yeah, but Rocky, if you’re making those choices because of me—“

“Then you shouldn’t blame yourself for things you didn’t ask for. It isn’t your fault you’re being forced to reproduce. It isn’t your fault you can’t trust any of the people who are supposed to be helping you. It isn’t your fault you and I were stuck on Mary together for years and years and you’re just as much an honorary member of my family as I am of yours.”

“Rocky, I’m pretty sure that last one was actually my doing. I was never gonna do anything differently, but I still made the choice to—”

“To save me. To save my planet. And unwittingly condemn yourself. If you hadn’t come back for me, you’d be on Earth right now and none of this would be happening to you.”

Grace raised a hand. “Hold on a sec. Are you— do you blame yourself for what’s happened to me? You do realize you’re the only good thing in my life right now, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And so then it’s my fault you and Adrian are going through a rough patch.”

“No!”

“Okay, so then can we stop this whole dance?” Grace twirled his finger. “I won’t blame myself for your marital issues if you don’t blame yourself for my life being in the toilet?”

Rocky grumbled.

“Buddy, do you think you can out-stubborn me on this? You have no idea.” He slapped his own thigh. “This bad boy can fit so much self-loathing.”

“Ugh. Fine. I don’t want to spend all night watching you cry or drool or whatever you do when you’re sad. It always gets on me. Gross. Nasty.”

“Yeah, I love you too, pal.”

The baby was still kicking. Grace put a hand on his belly.

“Is the clone baby still moving?”

“Yeah, I think it might have the hiccups or something. Did you know human babies practice breathing before they’re born by inhaling that fluid?

“Gross. I want to feel hiccups.” Rocky came back over and put his hand on Grace’s belly like it didn’t even occur to him that maybe he should ask after the first time. Grace liked that.

“Did you also know they get their kidneys running by swallowing that same fluid? Then they pee it out so they can breathe it and swallow it all over again.”

“That’s the worst and most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life,” Rocky said. He moved his hand a little so he could better feel the baby’s hiccups.

And the weeks continued to pass.

His belly continued to grow. His back ached, his hips ached, and his belly hung low in front of him, unable to be ignored or forgotten about. He was always physically uncomfortable now, and it was even getting harder to breathe. Sitting down hurt, laying down to sleep hurt, and he was constantly congested and didn’t understand why.

Then his Eridian doctors gave him the date of his scheduled c-section, and he instantly realized what he’d be trading all the pain and discomfort for, and he was terrified to lose it. He would happily spend every night for the rest of his life spinning in his bed like a rotisserie chicken as he searched in vain for a comfortable sleeping position if it meant he’d never have to give birth.

Well. He knew what the kitty said when the milk ran dry.

He was keeping himself occupied so he wouldn’t have to think too long and hard about it. He’d talked Rocky into spending more time with Adrian lately (telling him that even if waiting to start having kids was the right thing for him, Adrian would likely take it a lot better if he was around more in general) so more often than not, he really was keeping himself occupied. 

He took a lot of walks. He watched a lot of movies. He read a lot of books and got really, really into an Eridian speculative fiction series about what would happen to Eridian society if Eridians suddenly started only laying one egg at a time instead of five. It was sort of funny watching a world melt down over a crisis that was just, you know, human reality.

He was working toward the end of the third book. In this one, Erid had fractured into nations (hey, how about that) and it was looking like a lot of those nations were about to start a lot of wars over territory and resources, which was probably gonna be the plot of the fourth book. Grace was wondering if maybe there was some small amount of validity to the idea that war existed on Earth in part due to a dearth of quintuplets when he felt the first cramp.

It wasn’t much of a cramp. He’d had worse period cramps before. But the fact that it made him think of period cramps at all was terrifying, because that was what it felt like, and he was under the impression that labor pains felt a lot like period cramps but, like, a million times worse.

He put his book down and stared at the wall. The cramp didn’t let up, and didn’t let up, until suddenly it did.

He took a shaky breath. Braxton Hicks. It had to be. It was too soon to be anything else.

He got up a little too quickly, and suddenly he was cramping again.

He leaned against a wall. No. No, no way. He was only thirty-three weeks. He couldn’t already be in labor. His c-section was still more than a month away. He wasn’t ready. He couldn’t go into labor at thirty-three weeks.

But some people did. Some people did deliver prematurely, and it didn’t matter that they thought they had another month to psych themselves up. It didn’t matter if they didn’t have a crib or a name or a single solitary idea of what they were doing, because if the baby was coming and Grace wasn’t ready, then Grace was just out of luck.

Grace felt nauseated. He was breathing too quickly. His belly was cramping. The edges of his vision were starting to go gray. He was gonna pass out and no one was even gonna know anything was wrong with him and he was gonna die.

He needed Rocky. He needed Rocky to save him.

…Except no he didn’t. What could Rocky do except freak out with him and call his doctors? Grace could do that himself. He didn’t need Rocky unless what he really needed was a hug.

It was entirely possible that that was what he really needed, but Grace managed to stagger over to Armando anyway.

Armando checked his cervix, tracked his heart rate, and took a blood sample. His diagnoses in order of severity were that Grace was 1) having a panic attack, 2) was slightly dehydrated, and 3) having Braxton Hicks contractions. The recommended course of treatment was to follow some deep breathing exercises and drink some water.

By the time Armando returned with his diagnoses, Grace had mostly come down from the panic attack on his own. He accepted a cup of water from Armando with trembling hands, and by the time he finished it, his cramping had gone away, too.

Later, when Rocky found out about the episode (because Armando was a huge snitch), he praised Grace for keeping a level head even though he had undoubtedly been in massive distress. He said that Grace had done exactly what he should have done in the circumstances.

Grace said thanks but didn’t really mean it. Dissatisfaction sat heavy in his gut. He still didn’t feel ready.

A week passed. He got a crib and diapers and clothes. His first tub of formula arrived, which he tasted and was a little offended that it tasted better than the fake milk soup the Eridians had designed for his cereal. He still wasn’t ready.

Another week passed. He had mostly settled on a name, and he had mostly settled on what he was gonna do about the gender question. If you were gonna be a transgender man raising his own clone from birth and you had no idea if your clone was going to also be transgender, it turned out raising your clone baby on an alien planet where gender didn’t exist in the first place offered a pretty neat solution.

He still wasn’t ready.

Yet another week passed. He still had no idea what he was doing. He still wasn’t ready. He knew he wasn’t doing anything the way he was supposed to. He knew he should be talking to the baby and trying to eat well and, like, doing yoga or something. He’d be happy and glowing if only he could do what he was supposed to do.

He didn’t want to do any of that. He wanted to crawl in a hole like a scared animal riding out a storm. He wanted everything to be over already. He wasn’t ready and he was beginning to think not only would he never be ready, but that there was something fundamentally wrong with him that meant he was gonna fuck everything up and ruin the baby worse than the Eridians ever could.

He wanted his mother. He couldn’t even fully remember what she had been like, but he still wanted her.

Grace sat in the surf of his ocean. It was too cold for swimming, but it felt nice to let the chilly water run over his legs and feet. Rocky sat on the shore close by, keeping a metaphorical eye on him.

Grace really wanted to go swimming. His whole body was sore and he longed to be suspended in the water. He was thirty-eight weeks and six days pregnant. His c-section was scheduled for tomorrow.

“Did you know the Immaculate Conception refers to the conception of Mary herself, not Jesus?”

“What?” Rocky paused with his hands still on the little sand sculptures he was making. “Are you talking about one of your Earth religions?”

“Yeah. A lot of people are under the misconception that the Immaculate Conception refers to Mary becoming pregnant with Jesus while still a virgin. But really, the Immaculate Conception refers to Mary having been conceived without original sin so she’d be a proper vessel for Jesus.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The surf lifted Grace’s feet up and water rushed beneath him. “…Yeah, I don’t really get it either. I don’t believe in any of that kind of stuff. Just can’t stop really thinking about how weird it is. The Hail Mary. Full of Grace. Blessed be the fruit of thy womb. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. I’d thought the fruit of the womb was supposed to be the Taumoeba. But what if it was me all along? Am I Mary, or am I the fruit of her womb?”

Rocky went back to his sand sculptures. He didn’t appear to be listening very closely to Grace.

“I never really got the chance to ask,” Grace said. “She said she believed in God, but I don’t know if she was Catholic or anything. For all I know, she was thinking about American football when she named the project. Wouldn’t that be funny? Like, all the pieces are there, you put them together and they make a really cute picture of a dog, but the picture on the box is of some kids sledding. Like, what are the odds things would wind up like this?”

The waves were a pleasant push and pull against his body. He wondered what would happen if he let them carry him a little further away from shore. He didn’t move, of course, but he wondered how long it would feel nice until it didn’t.

“Someone left a rosary on my door this morning.”

Rocky tilted toward Grace. “What’s that?”

“Religious item, a string of beads. Catholics use them to pray.”

“Someone left a human religious item on your door?”

Grace splashed the water dismissively. “I know who, that’s not the big mystery. I can even sorta reason out why they did it. I just don’t get what they thought it would mean to me, personally. I mean, I guess maybe things are different for Eridians. On Earth, I’m probably one of the last people anyone would think to assume was religious. It just has different connotations.”

He gently lowered himself until he was laying down in the sand and staring up at the facets of the dome he could see in his sky. “You don’t really get to be religious if you’re like me. I wonder what it’s like.”

“Grace, you’re speaking in riddles and it’s very annoying. What’s the deal with this string of beads?”

“You’re supposed to use it to count the number of times you say a specific prayer. The big one is the Hail Mary. Most of the beads are Hail Mary’s. So, like, to someone who’s read up a little bit about Earth religions and who knows I’m having a tough time, it probably seems like a good choice of a gift for me. Having arrived on the Hail Mary and all. But it’s like… no one from Earth would actually think to give me a rosary because I’m very obviously not an observant Catholic. I might even take it as a backhanded insult, like someone’s telling me to get right with God or something.

“That’s not how they meant it, of course. They probably just assumed humans naming a ship the Hail Mary would believe in the prayer, and so the rosary would be a comfort. I’m just like… how do they always do this? Every effort they make to understand me just turns out wrong.”

“Do you even want me to ask who you’re talking about? Or are you just talking to hear yourself talk.”

“That’s something else interesting,” Grace said softly. “The beads were pink. How did they know they’re pink?”

“You’re doing this on purpose aren’t you?”

Grace gasped softly and murmured, “Rosebud.” Rocky threw a glob of wet sand at him.

The too-hot room had been freshly scrubbed and sterilized. Grace, also freshly scrubbed and sterilized, sat on the edge of the bed as Eridians in xenonite suits rushed this way and that, setting up machines and laying out instruments and doing everything in their power to keep Grace’s anxiety at a near-boil.

The only Eridian who wasn’t running around was Rocky. He was holding Grace’s hand, positioned right in front of him as if he could protect Grace from the room and the doctors and the flurry of activity.

Grace was holding Rocky’s hand, and with his other hand he was cupping his belly. He was cramping again, but it didn’t really matter whether he was in labor or not.

Grace felt better than he thought he would. He also felt worse. He didn’t feel much of anything, to be honest. He felt strangely numb, like he was caught tight in a zipped-up bag and unable to move the way he wanted. His body felt heavy and not like his own.

Well, it hadn’t felt like his own body in months. But today in particular it felt like a dead thing he was attached to, observing at a distance.

“When is it gonna be over?” Grace asked. His body was shivering slightly, which he thought was odd. Why should he be shivering when it was so hot?

“Brave Grace,” Rocky said. He was speaking exceptionally quietly, as if he intended for no one other than Grace to hear him. “So brave, so strong. Everything is going to be alright.”

“Rocky, you know I’m not brave. I’ve never been brave once in my miserable life.”

“That’s not true. I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t true. You have no idea how brave you are.”

A doctor approached with the biggest, scariest needle (okay, second-scariest) that Grace had ever seen in his life. Time for the spinal block.

They had Grace lean over and hold as still as he could. Someone began swabbing his back with an antiseptic. Grace wanted to leap off the table. These were the people who had done this to him in the first place, and they were going to be shoving a needle into his spine and he was supposed to just let them. How could he possibly trust any of them with this? How could he trust anyone ever again?

Grace said, “Hey Rocky, if I wind up paralyzed for life—“

He stopped. He’d meant to say something stupid like take care of Armando for me, but the words died on his tongue. The possibility of being paralyzed for life suddenly wasn’t very funny at all. None of this was funny.

Grace leaned over and tried to stop shivering as Rocky kept singling softly about how brave he was. Rocky was the only thing keeping him still and keeping him from losing his mind. 

The needle entered his back. He could hear the Eridians behind him discussing how far in it needed to go, and he was reminded that this was their first time doing anything like this before. All the more reason to poop his metaphorical pants in terror.

He could feel something in his spine softly crackling as the needle moved.

A sudden cool sensation began spreading down from his chest, and he felt even less connected to his body than before. An Eridian doctor began poking at him with ice of all things, asking how intense the cold sensation was at various parts of his body. On his belly, on his thigh, on his foot, and then back to his belly but on the other side. The sensation of cold grew duller and duller until Grace couldn’t perceive it at all.

They moved him onto the operating table then, telling him to lift his body as much as he could. Everything below his chest felt like dead weight. He kept expecting that cool sensation to start creeping up toward the rest of him. Would he still be able to breathe if that happened? Or would the anesthetic envelope his brain and he’d just peacefully drift off not knowing what was happening to him?

The doctors put up a sheet so Grace wouldn’t see them carve him open. He could hear them going over the procedure plan one last time, unfamiliar notes riddled throughout their speech that he could tell from context clues were probably invented terms for the fine details of his anatomy.

He whispered to Rocky, “When is it gonna be over?”

“They’ve only just started. Can’t you feel?”

Grace couldn’t. He could feel the doctors touching him more roughly than he was used to. He had thought they were pantomiming their first moves. Were they cutting into him already? 

Was this what being dead was like? Laying on a table unable to move, unable to feel as people poked you and did whatever they wanted to you? Or was it just another Tuesday in the life of Ryland Grace?

The touches on the other side of the sheet went deeper. He could feel hands inside of him. Multiple hands. Someone was holding something open while someone else was pulling or tearing or cutting something. He couldn’t tell what was happening except that it didn’t feel good.

When was it going to be over? Someone was tugging at his insides again. He was probably going to poop weird for the rest of his life. When was it going to be over? This was taking way longer than he thought it would. It had already been ten minutes or more since they started cutting. When was it going to be—

There was a wet noise that sounded like something between a cough and the squeak of a balloon. It was another human voice in the room. The shock of hearing another human voice registered with Grace before he even realized that it was the noise of a baby crying.

He hadn’t realized. He hadn’t heard a sound made by another real human being in nearly a decade. He hadn’t realized that that was what he had been waiting for. He hadn’t wanted it to be over; he’d been waiting for this moment all along.

“Give it here,” Grace said, and the sudden energy in his voice surprised him. The baby was still crying somewhere on the other side of the sheet, and Grace would’ve been sitting up and making grabby hands if he could. He hadn’t known he’d need this, he hadn’t known—

“Wait, hold on.” Rocky was still holding his hand, but he was reaching behind the curtain too, moving with urgency. 

“Give it to me, g-give it, don’t take it away, please don’t—“

Then Rocky was back, he was holding a crying baby, and he put the baby on Grace’s bare chest.

Grace hadn’t touched another human being in years. This was the first human being he’d seen or heard or touched in years. He brought his arms around the baby and said “Oh my god,” and he was crying.

The baby’s skin was cold and wet. It was covered in a waxy film and a little bit of blood. It was still crying, but with less intensity now that Grace was holding it. Grace didn’t think he could ever let it go. Not now that he had it in his arms. A real human being.

He brought his finger to its mouth and it stopped crying and sucked the tip of his finger. Grace stared at it, amazed that he had made it stop crying just by touching it. He’d just somehow known what it needed.

He hadn’t known it would be like this. He hadn’t known it would feel like this. 

Rocky was saying something that Grace couldn’t understand. It was like his world had shrunk down to the size of himself and the baby and nothing else could intrude. Rocky had to repeat himself twice before Grace understood him.

“I said, are you cold? You’re very pale.”

Grace blinked at Rocky. “Oh. Yeah. Kinda cold.

Rocky growled softly and yelled at Grace’s doctors about the amount of blood he was losing. Grace shivered and clutched his baby tighter and closed his eyes.

He dozed a little. The doctors were still pulling and tugging at his insides, but it was a lot easier to ignore now. Eventually someone lifted his baby away from him, but Grace didn’t even open his eyes because he knew without looking that it was Rocky, and that was fine. Rocky was the only other person allowed to hold his baby.

Later, after he was all stitched up and cleaned up and someone had (badly) swaddled the baby in one of the soft-brown blankets the Eridians had prepared, Grace and Rocky were left alone in the too-hot room with the baby.

Grace unwrapped the baby to examine them a little more closely. Ten fingers, ten toes. Very light blond hair and barely-there eyebrows. A ghost of a memory rose in Grace of a baby photo that had looked very much like his baby. Was that him? He wished he could remember more photos from his childhood so he might guess what the kid would look like when they got a little older.

The baby’s eyes blinked open. They regarded Grace calmly with colorless eyes that reminded Grace of the overcast sky. Then they closed their eyes and went back to sleep.

“You look so much like a potato, it’s unreal,” Grace murmured. “Rocky, can you believe this? I mean, can you believe this?”

“I can. I was there. I watched the whole thing. Grace…”

“What if I named them Potato? It’s my favorite kind of tuber. I’d kill for some waffle fries right about now.”

“Grace,” Rocky said softly, and Grace looked over. “...You mentioned once about human hormones changing moods. Is that happening now?”

“Absolutely,” Grace said, looking back down at the baby. “Right now I am being positively flooded with oxytocin and endorphins. Love hormones.”

“...How much are you yourself right now?”

“Still myself,” Grace said, smiling down at the baby. “Just a little high on the baby. And very very happy to not be pregnant anymore.” He took the baby’s adorable little hands and lightly clapped them together. “Yaaay. Hooraaaaay.”

Rocky was quiet for a moment. “...It’s not a bad thing. But it’s a very stark turnaround.”

“It happens. The part of Earth where I’m from, it’s pretty rare for parents to relinquish their babies for adoption at birth. A big part of that is because of those intense bonding hormones. Parents give birth and get hit by the train and for some of them, it’s enough to make them change their minds.”

Rocky shivered. “...Eridians don’t have this. We have a protective instinct toward our children, and we love them, of course. But what’s happening to you right now isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen. You don’t look entirely sane.”

“I’m probably not. I didn’t sleep great last night. I feel a little punch-drunk.”

“I don’t know if I should be upset on your behalf or not,” Rocky said softly. “It’s a good thing. It’s unquestionably a good thing that you love your baby. But it almost feels like another way your will has been violated.”

Grace shrugged. “Try not to think of it like that. It just as easily could’ve gone the other way. A lot of humans don’t get enough of those love hormones. They have trouble bonding with their babies. That’s especially likely when the pregnancy was traumatic like mine was. So this is the best-case scenario.”

Rocky was quiet for a good while longer. Eventually he tapped his fingers and asked, “Do you want another one?”

“God, no,” Grace answered at once. He thrust the baby in Rocky’s direction. “Ugh. I got the ick. Take them away until I love them again.”

Rocky laughed softly in relief and did as Grace asked.

Those soft first few hours were incredibly special. Grace would think back to them fondly when reality came crashing back in.

Grace hadn’t really spared much of a thought for what would happen in the immediate aftermath of the baby’s birth. Without really considering it, he supposed he had assumed he’d recuperate for a few days with doctors checking in on them every hour until they deemed him well enough to go back to his dome.

But then the visitors started pouring in.

It was sort of obvious it was going to happen in retrospect. Everyone had wanted to see the alien when he first arrived, and now everyone wanted to see the alien baby. That was the whole reason the alien baby had been created in the first place, so people would see it. There wasn’t any use in protesting. Even if Grace tried to physically block the door, the Eridian visitors would stand on the other side of the xenonite panel and wave and coo and tinkle and ask obnoxious, invasive, insulting questions.

Some of the visitors were legitimate scientists. Biologists and sociologists and psychologists who just wanted to know more about what Grace had been through and what human families were like. It didn’t make their questions any less invasive or any less mortifying, but their curiosity was at least understandable.

And some of the nicer visitors even brought gifts for Grace and the baby. 

“Rocky, what even is this? It’s got a really gnarly edge I don’t like.”

“Oh, that’s sweet. It’s a traditional Eridian gift for a newborn. Their first chisel.”

“Chisel?!”

“Yes, for carving the initial lines of the crest of the family of origin into their legs. Oh, don’t look so scandalized. It’s a symbolic gift. Most people have their carvings done by laser nowadays.”

But not all of the visitors were as respectful as they should have been. The conversation he’d had with the pink Eridian kept flashing in his mind, and Grace seemed hyper-aware of when certain Eridians began to speak to him with something approaching condescension in their voices. Or when they asked too-personal questions that had nothing to do with their field of specialization.

Grace might have put up with it if hadn’t ever been pregnant. But these days he had a near-pathological suspicion of strangers. He huddled up with the baby and let Rocky deal with anyone who crossed a line. Very rude. Go away now. Savior Grace and his rest and his baby are much more important than your nosiness.

Some visitors really went beyond the pale, though.

One presented themself as a biologist specializing in reproductive science. Grace later found out that although they were part of a couple of Thrums relating to reproductive science, they weren’t actually a scientist, themself. They were instead a somewhat-infamous opponent of reproductive technology; they believed Eridians should return to burying their eggs underground instead of utilizing incubators. An advocate of “the traditional way” of doing things.

When they started asking questions about Grace’s c-section, it didn’t occur to Grace at first that this Eridian might’ve thought of a procedure which had saved millions of lives on Earth as a bad thing.

It soon became obvious.

“Isn’t it possible the surgical extraction of the child has interfered in some natural processes?” the crazy Eridian asked. “Humans are meant to produce a fluid with which to feed a child. Isn’t it true this fluid has not appeared yet? Could the c-section be the cause?”

Grace groaned and rolled over in bed, his face heating up. The unmitigated gall of this stranger to talk about his fluids. Grace had once thought that maybe a dim upside to Erid’s focus on societal cohesion even at the expense of free will might mean nutjobs like this wouldn’t be able to carve out a foothold in society. He was appalled to discover he was wrong.

And this jerk was avoiding utilizing pronouns! Why were they even bothering to ask Grace anything when they clearly didn’t respect his intellect at all?

Rocky was on top of things, already banging on the xenonite panel in the wall, trying to shoo them away. “Too personal by far. Go away and don’t come back.”

The crazy Eridian ignored Rocky. “The natural process must surely be as sacred to humans as it is to Eridians. The surgery was elective, purportedly, but why would any thinking, feeling human risk fracturing the bond between mother and child by depriving—“

“Wait just a second,” Grace interrupted. “What did you just say to me?”

Rocky, who’d already been gearing up to explode on the crazy Eridian, grew still at the tone of Grace’s voice.

“Pardon?” The crazy Eridian said. “The fractured bond between mother and child? That’s the correct phrasing, is it not? With the understanding gleaned from human media that this mother’s love is something special beyond other forms of—“

“You don’t use that word,” Grace said. His every word was dripping with contempt. He was even shaking a little, he was so full of outrage he was only just barely keeping a lid on. “I don’t know what human media you consumed, but I know you must’ve observed enough to be able to tell the difference between a woman and a man. So you’re either stupid or deaf, and I don’t really care which. I’m telling you now, you don’t ever use that word to talk about me again.”

“There seems to have been some confusion,” the crazy Eridian said carefully. “The birthing parent is the mother.”

“Did I invite you to argue with me?!” Grace was suddenly on his feet, moving faster than someone two days out from major abdominal surgery should have been capable of moving, the baby in his arms whining softly at the tension in the room. Grace stalked toward the xenonite panel, feeling like he was breathing fire, and the Eridian shrank back. Despite having what was probably at least seven hundred pounds on Grace and being behind unbreakable xenonite, they shrank back.

Rocky very quickly grabbed the baby from Grace’s arms and beat a retreat to a corner of the room, halfway up the wall like the spider-monster he was.

“Who do you think you are, presenting yourself to me, criticizing the choices I’ve made, telling me what I am? Thinking you can tell me that I’m something I’m not because you saw a movie? Let’s just get one thing hashed out before I plant my foot up your mouth. I saved your everloving planet. So when I tell you I’m a man, you get down on all five of your knees and you say, Yes, sir. Have I made myself abundantly clear, you… you…”

“Staggering waste of carbon,” Rocky helpfully supplied.

“Staggering waste of carbon!” Grace finished.

The Eridian skittered down the hall and disappeared.

Grace waited until they were out of hearing range. He pressed a shaking hand to his middle. “Hey, Rocky.”

“Yes, Grace?”

“Can you help me get back to bed? I’m in immense pain right now.”

Rocky climbed down the wall. “If you tore your stitches, I’m gonna yell at you the way you yelled at that loser.”

“You wish you could yell at me like that. Maybe then I wouldn’t tune you out.” Rocky lifted himself as high as he could, and Grace sat on him. Rocky carried Grace to bed like a walking stool. “…So there’s no way that moron was actually some kind of authority, right? If I get in trouble for that outburst, I’m gonna take the Taumoeba back and let the Astrophage eat your star.”

“We’d deserve it,” Rocky said with an air of resignation.

Less than an hour after their departure, the pink Eridian showed up on the other side of the xenonite wall. Such a speedy response, Grace figured someone had to be in big trouble even if it wasn’t him.

“I apologize for the rudeness of your last guest,” the pink Eridian said without preamble. “They will not be returning. Rest assured all future visitors you have will be heavily briefed to refer to you correctly and respectfully, or else they will incur a heavy penalty.”

“Penalty?” Grace asked. “You’re making it illegal to misgender me?”

“In a reductionist sort of way, yes. You saved our planet. You will be afforded all due hospitality.”

“Wow.” The laughing ghosts of his old students took over his mouth and he said, “Based.”

“Indeed,” the pink Eridian said. “But I also need to speak to you about your own behavior.”

Grace stiffened. “I’m not going to apologize about anything I said to that idiot.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to. But I have concerns about how you’ve been treating some of your other guests.”

“Guests I haven’t asked for,” Grace snapped.

“You consented to seeing as many visitors as wanted to see you when you previously inhabited this room. The marked change in your behavior is concerning.”

“That was before you forced a pregnancy on me. That was before I had a baby I need to protect. I’m not interested in being your dancing monkey anymore.”

“I’m sorry you feel that’s what you’ve been made into. Your other guests are meant to be learning about you and learning from you.”

“I’m not having it anymore, okay?!” Grace gestured angrily as he spoke. “I’m sick of it all. I’m not answering any more questions about my miserable pregnancy, or how it feels to recover from childbirth, or about whether I'm lactating. I need some privacy and alone time with my baby.”

The pink Eridian was quiet for a moment. “…It’s a shame we’re unable to reach a consensus on this. But I can ensure you have more privacy and alone time.”

“Great.” Grace sat too heavily on his bed and winced. “That’s all I want.”

Grace realized his mistake the next day when Rocky never showed up.

The baby and the doctors kept him busy (and the visitors who were still coming, even when Grace wouldn’t greet them and wouldn’t look at them) but Grace always knew when it was about time for Rocky to come see him again. A couple hours before then, he’d start watching the clock, doing the math and counting how many Eridian hours it had been since Rocky was last there. How many more Eridian hours it would be until he arrived.

The clock ticked on. Grace fed the baby and changed the baby’s diaper and walked around the room for a little bit. The baby napped and Grace napped, and then the baby woke up and wanted to eat again.

The clock ticked on. Rocky didn’t come.

One of Grace’s doctors entered the room to check his incision.

“Hey, um,” Grace said. “Did Rocky say anything about being busy today?”

“I’m afraid not, Savior Grace.”

Grace changed the baby and then paced a little bit. The baby napped, but Grace laid awake in his bed, staring at the airlock.

He knew what was happening by then, of course. Worrying about it wouldn’t help. He just had to buckle down and focus on his baby until they decided he’d been punished enough and let Rocky come see him again.

The baby took up a lot of time and energy. Grace had hoped it would be easy not to think when he was busy taking care of the baby by himself. But instead, every constant little thing the baby needed just made him all the more aware of how tired and alone he was.

Other visitors were still coming. Grace knew without needing to ask that if he didn’t cooperate with these visits, he wouldn’t be seeing Rocky again any time soon.

The visitors asked how he was sleeping. The answer was that he wasn’t, really. Without anyone there he trusted to help with the baby, he was only sleeping in tiny snatches when the baby was quiet and content to be put down (which wasn’t often).

The visitors asked about the baby’s hygiene. Grace had no idea where to begin with it. There wasn’t anybody on the planet who had ever given a human baby a bath before. Grace stood at the sink and tried to figure it out without scalding the baby or dropping the baby. He splashed some water on the baby and they screamed like they were being flayed alive. He put some soap in the baby’s hair, but when he tried to rinse it out, water ran into the baby’s mouth and they choked and screamed some more, shaking and turning bright red. Grace gave up and wrapped them in a blanket without even bothering to put a diaper back on them. He hadn’t had a bath in a long time, either.

And whenever Grace put together a bottle in front of his visitors, they made embarrassed noises and shuffled their feet awkwardly. Most of them didn’t directly ask about it, but Grace got the feeling they would really prefer he didn’t feed the baby in their presence.

He didn’t know what to do about that. Human babies ate when they needed to eat. He couldn’t put it off if he had visitors. But he couldn’t be rude, either.

He pasted a smile on his face even though he was exhausted and overstimulated and hungry and disgusted with the way his body still felt. His hair was sticking out in every direction and he was bleeding through his bandages and his arms shook every time he lifted his baby. He smiled and put the bottle in his baby’s mouth and asked his visitors to please excuse him. Human babies were very particular about eating. There wasn’t anything he could do about it. Please excuse him. Please.

He couldn’t stop looking at the clock. He knew Rocky wouldn’t be coming anytime soon. But it was almost a compulsion to count the hours since he’d last seen him and try to imagine how many more it would be until he’d see him again.

“Are you alright, Savior Grace?” One of his current visitors asked. “You’re breathing rather rapidly.”

“Yes, of course,” Grace said, widening his smile. “Just a little stressed out. Human babies can be a handful. Please excuse me.”

His doctors eventually deemed he and the baby were healthy enough to return to the biodome.

He trudged back up the hill to his house with his baby in his arms and a bag of supplies slung over his shoulder. Rocky had wanted to do the baby’s naming ceremony the day they both came home. It was an Eridian custom, and they weren’t even going to do it the proper way, but Grace still didn’t want to start calling the baby by their name until Rocky was there. He didn’t want Rocky to miss an occasion that was important to him.

He opened the door half-hoping Rocky would be waiting for him inside. But the house was cold and desolate. Armando whirred softly and opened his pincers in greeting, but to Grace he might as well have been just another piece of furniture.

Nights were the worst. The darkness did something to Grace’s mind that he didn’t fully understand. His stomach dropped every time he noticed the light in his dome beginning to dim, and he became filled with doubt and anxiety.

He couldn’t sleep. He sat awake in his bed listening to his baby grunt and cough. He wasn’t able to put the baby down. The baby cried every time he tried. 

Armando helped. Armando could make a bottle and change a diaper and feed the baby. But the baby seemed to cry harder when Armando did any of those things, and Grace often felt compelled to take the baby back and just do things himself. He felt sure something about Armando was hurting the baby, even when he knew that didn’t make sense. Armando took care of him when he was in a years-long coma. Armando could take care of a baby for five minutes at a time.

Then Grace would remember the way Yao and Ilyukhina’s corpses looked when he found them and his animal anxiety would override his rationality.

What was he doing? What had he been thinking, trying to take care of a baby? Hadn’t he known they were going to be depending on him for everything? How could he have thought he’d be the better choice? He was all alone on an alien planet with a human baby who he’d probably kill or break or traumatize without even realizing what he was doing.

He wanted Rocky. Rocky would know what to do. Rocky was the only safe thing in the world anymore.

He sat awake each night with his baby, feeling the darkness seep into him and kill any joy or comfort he might have known. The minutes felt like hours. The hours never ended.

There was a knock at the door. Grace had to swim through his own exhaustion to answer it.

The pink Eridian stood there. Grace felt absolutely nothing at the sight of them.

“May I come in?” They asked.

Grace stepped aside. The pink Eridian dipped in a gesture of gratitude and entered.

The house was a wreck. Clothes and food and bottles and baby toys were everywhere. 

The baby was having tummy time. They were looking at a black and white high-contrast slideshow Grace had playing on his laptop.

“Are you doing alright?” The pink Eridian asked. “You expressed you didn’t want help with childcare, and I will continue to respect that, but perhaps you’d like a cleaner to help keep your home manageable.”

Grace grunted softly.

“There’s no shame in needing support. Eridians raise their hatchlings with the help of their mates and their extended families. Very few of them do it alone.”

Grace closed his eyes. “...I had support.”

“One person is not a very stable network of support.”

Grace didn’t say anything.

The baby began to complain about having been left on their tummy for so long. Grace needed to go get them. But he didn’t feel like he could move.

The pink Eridian approached the baby. “May I?”

Grace felt like he should protest and yell and kick the pink Eridian out. But he really didn’t have the energy to do any of that. “...Sure. Why not?”

The pink Eridian carefully scooped up the baby and flipped them so they were on their back in their arms. “They’re so cute. All babies are, really. Have you had a naming ceremony yet?”

“No. Rocky needs to be here for it.”

“Well, that’s why I’m here. I wanted to gauge whether you’re ready to begin visiting with Rocky again tomorrow.”

Grace’s heart leapt. He found the energy to sit up. “You’re gonna let me see Rocky again?”

The pink Eridian lightly bounced the baby. “You seem to be getting along with your guests again.”

Grace swallowed past a lump in his throat. There was so much he wanted to say, so much he wanted to express. What was even safe to say? What else would the pink Eridian take away from him if he displeased them?

He hadn’t considered that he would be more vulnerable than ever with a baby. 

Rocky showed up hours earlier than he usually did. Probably trying to make up for lost time. Even so, Grace and the baby were already out on the beach waiting for him as he practically galloped across the sand.

Rocky’s song wavered when he hugged Grace and the baby. “They’re already so much bigger! How could I have missed so much?”

“Nevermind that,” Grace said, smiling like his guilt wasn’t a knife in his guts. “It’s time for the naming ceremony!”

“You waited for me?”

“Of course I waited, Rock.” Grace rubbed tears out of his eyes. “You’re the only family we’ve got.”

The ceremony didn’t last very long. An ordinary naming ceremony usually involved an entire extended family and four or five more babies. And they weren’t doing anything permanent to anyone’s body that required a great deal of precision and care. Instead of a chisel, Grace had a blue marker.

He also didn’t have a family crest to give his child. All he had was a name.

On the baby’s chubby little arm, Grace wrote his surname. Their surname now, too.

Then he handed the baby over to Rocky, and he wrote his baby’s given name on his own arm. IRIS.

After the ceremony, Rocky dragged Grace into the house. “Okay. Most urgent business is out of the way. Your child has a name. Now we turn to the second-most urgent business. You look like shit.”

“Gee, buddy,” Grace said. “I love you and missed you, too.”

“No, this is serious. Have you been sleeping in a ditch? Have you been sleeping at all?” Rocky grabbed Grace’s quilt from where it lay crumpled on the floor. He draped it over his arms. “I’ll watch the baby. You go clean yourself and take a nap.”

Grace hesitated. “Rocky, I can’t.”

“Yes you can. Rocky’s orders.”

“No, you don’t get it. I can’t. It’s like something biological. I can’t sleep, I can barely eat. I can’t even leave the baby with Armando.”

“You’re not. You’re leaving the baby with me.” Rocky pulled Iris over the blanket over his arms and swaddled them badly. Grace would’ve loved to see an Eridian try to roll a burrito.

“Rocky—”

“Grace.” Rocky’s voice was quiet and firm. “Look at them. They’re already sleeping.”

And they were. Iris’s mouth was hanging slightly open and they were sighing baby-soft sighs that made Grace’s heart clench.

“Now stop being a martyr for once in your life and take care of yourself,” Rocky said. “I need some time with them to think of what the Eridian word for their name should be.”

Grace’s feet carried him out of the room. Every step felt like a betrayal. Something was going to go terribly wrong and Grace would be too far away to stop it. 

But Rocky was there. The only person Grace could trust. The only person who could fix anything. Brilliant, capable, wonderful Rocky. Rocky was perhaps the most exceptional being Grace had ever met. His baby was his heart, and his heart would be safe in Rocky’s hands for a little while.

Grace went and stood under the shower for a bit. When he felt a little bit more like a human being, he fell into his bed and the next thing he knew, the light in his room was completely different. It must have been at least eight hours, maybe more.

Grace emerged from the bedroom. Rocky was holding Iris in one arm, feeding them with another, and pointing his camera gun at Grace’s laptop with a third. The laptop was playing a video demonstrating different techniques for burping a baby.

“Oh my god, Rocky,” Grace still felt stupid with sleep, but he hurried over. “I’m so sorry for leaving you alone with them for so long. You should have woken me up.” 

“No, you needed it. I’m the one who’s sorry,” Rocky said. “I watched you sleep when I could. Human babies are very demanding. No wonder you looked like an insane person after so long with them on your own.”

Grace took Iris and the bottle from Rocky. They whined for half a second until Grace shoved the nipple back into their mouth.

“I can’t let them separate us like that again,” Rocky said softly. “They don’t understand. It’s too cruel.”

“Rock, I think they understand just fine. The cruelty is the point.” Grace yawned and sat down on the couch.

Rocky was quiet for a moment. “...Grace…” He said Grace’s name slowly, as if he didn’t know how to say what he wanted to say.

Grace shook his head. “...Yeah. I get it.”

Neither of them said anything else for a long time.

Grace started his classes with Iris bundled up against his chest. His students went nuts over them, all of the kids scrabbling up against the xenonite wall and honking in excitement to get a better look at them.

“Guys, guys, you’re gonna wake them up.” Grace was smiling widely. It was the first time he’d really felt like himself again in a long time. “Do you guys wanna know something interesting that Erid and Earth have in common? They both have volcanos! Who can tell what makes a volcano form?”

Grace was woken up by Iris making baby-soft noises in the dark of their bedroom.

He flicked the lamp on, muttering sleepily, “Hold on. Daddy’s coming.”

He pulled himself out of bed, stretching as he headed for the crib. Iris wasn’t upset yet, wasn’t crying or screaming. But they were awake and ready to eat and eager for the world to know about it.

He leaned over the crib. Iris was babbling quietly, sucking on their fingers. When they saw Grace, their face lit up with a smile and they bounced their feet against the mattress, gasping in happiness.

Grace couldn’t help but smile back. “Well, hello. Hello, sweet baby.” He lifted them out of the crib. “Let’s get you some food, huh?”

He held Iris in one arm while he put together the bottle with his free hand. It was slow going, and Iris’s noises steadily began to grow louder, more upset.

“Hang on,” Grace said. “Patience, Iris.”

By the time he got back to the bedroom, Iris was crying in full force. Grace settled into his bed, shifting Iris into a proper feeding hold.

“Hey, hey, calm down, Iris. Time for food.”

But they had worked themself up too far; even when Grace tried to pop the bottle into their mouth, they kept crying.

Grace leaned over and blew a raspberry into Iris’s fat little baby cheek. Immediately Iris burst into giggles. Before they could get worked up again, Grace stuck the bottle in their mouth. They latched at once and gave a single, soft whine as they started to eat.

Their eyes fluttered open. They were still wet and full of tears, so Grace balanced the bottle with his chin and gently wiped Iris’s tears away with his sleeve. “All better now?” Grace asked. “Yeah, I know. Life’s hard when you’re a little baby and you can’t do anything on your own.”

Iris was gazing up at him, their eyes beginning to grow heavy with sleep again even while they drank.

Grace gazed back at them. The house was warm and his bed was warm and his baby was warm in his arms. Everything was warm and wonderful.

Moments like these weren’t always warm and wonderful. Sometimes there were nights where Grace couldn’t get Iris to settle in their crib. Sometimes there were nights where Iris would cry and cry and wouldn’t eat and nothing Grace did could calm them down.

There were nights where Grace had to take himself away. Nights where his heart felt heavy and hard and he sat on the other side of a door from his crying baby, trembling and hating himself and hating that this was his life, he hadn’t had a choice, he didn’t want this.

He tried very hard not to resent Iris. Most of the time he was successful at it.

Most of the time, he could smile at his baby and hug them and kiss their forehead and love them.

Moments like this made it easy to love Iris. Sitting in bed in the warm glow of the lamp, Iris falling asleep in his arms. This was his baby. This was his child. They were growing day by day. They knew who he was. He was their daddy, and maybe they loved him just as much as he loved them.

When they stopped sucking on their bottle and their arms had gone floppy, Grace carefully rose from his bed and put them back in their crib. Their eyes blinked open once more, saw Grace, and closed again. They were already fast asleep.

Grace stood over the crib for a little while longer. Looking at his baby and watching them sleep. Enjoying the magic for as long as he could.

“We’ll work around your class schedule, of course,” the pink Eridian said as Grace held his head in his hands. “It won’t be very often. Twice an Earth year and only during school breaks.”

“I don’t want to do it at all. Travelling with a little kid sounds like torture.”

“I’m afraid I must insist. We could have been scheduling appearances during your pregnancy—”

Grace shuddered at the mere thought of it.

“--But we felt you were owed a measure of privacy while your condition was so delicate. This is the compromise, Doctor Grace.”

Grace sat silently. He knew how this would go by now. He couldn’t outright refuse; that would only earn him a penalty and he’d still have to do it anyway. But if he held out long enough, depending on how conciliatory they were feeling, he might be able to win an additional concession or two. The pink Eridian loved a good negotiation.

“Or,” the pink Eridian said slowly, “We could schedule your appearances during the academic term instead. It could be a special class trip for your students. Visiting different parts of Erid, sitting in on very important Thrums while their teacher speaks on Eridian-human relations.” The pink Eridian leaned in a little closer. “I know you’ve been corresponding with certain scientists on the coast about non-ionizing radiation. Wouldn’t you like to take your students to see what they’ve been building with your help?”

“I get to bring Rocky with me,” Grace countered. “And you go to bat talking those eggheads into making me one of my own.”

“Oh, yes. Humans are resistant to radiation. Still, why would you want a radiation machine?”

“Feeding Iris would be way easier if I had a microwave.”

“And now, for a practical demonstration,” Grace said, giving Iris a little shove from behind. They toddled forward on unsteady legs, arms waving as they fought to keep their balance. 

Grace’s students cheered them on. Iris was meant to be walking toward their favorite doll (Rocky had learned to crochet just for them and made most of their toys and clothes these days) but the enthusiastic Eridian voices made them pivot and waddle toward the xenonite wall instead.

Eventually they tripped, as Grace knew they would. Their helmet thudded lightly against the ground and they began to whine softly.

Grace hurried to pick them up. “...And that’s gravity. Iris fell pretty hard and fast there, huh? Can anyone tell me whether they would have hit the ground so quickly once they began to fall if we were on Earth?”

“No!” Topanga yelled out. “Erid has stronger gravity so things fall faster! That’s why they’re wearing the helmet!”

“Wait until I call on you, please.” Grace fetched Iris’s doll for them. They hugged it close, instantly calming down. “Well, I’m a lot bigger than Iris. Since stronger gravity means faster falling, does more mass mean faster falling?”

Students started yelling out conflicting answers.

“How about someone whose hand is raised?” Grace said. “DJ! What do you think?”

“Wocky,” Iris said. 

“Grace, please correct them on the proper pronunciation of my name.”

“There’s no point. They can’t say their R’s yet. You just have to wait until they grow into it.”

“Iris,” Rocky said, his affect serious. “I know you are extremely intelligent. I know this is true despite your shared genetic code with the man over there who is currently wearing his shirt inside-out.”

“I am?” Grace reached around and felt his tag. “Aw, beans—”

“I know you’re capable of saying my name,” Rocky said. “I expect you to give it your best effort.”

“Wocky,” Iris said.

“Can you say your own name?”

“Iwis.”

“Can you say the name of your progenitor who doesn’t realize he’s putting his shirt on backwards?”

“Son of a—”

“Daddy!”

“Well, Iris. One out of three. I’m afraid that’s a failing grade by any metric. You may be just like your father after all.”

“Daddy daddy daddy,” Iris sang. They were holding onto Rocky though, looking directly at Rocky.

Rocky squeaked, a wordless interjection that had Grace looking over, suddenly worried. Rocky wasn’t moving anymore. Rocky seemed a little stunned. 

“Hey, Iris,” Grace said, taking their hand and gently pulling them away. “Go color in the bedroom.”

“Can Wocky come?”

“Wocky and Daddy need to have grown-up talks,” Grace said. “He’ll come hang out with you later.”

Rocky still hadn’t moved from where he was standing even after Grace had Iris safely sequestered away.

“Everything okay, buddy?” Grace asked. “They didn’t cross a line, did they?”

“Not their fault,” Rocky finally uttered. “...I probably should have told you some time ago.”

“Told me what?”

“Adrian left.”

Grace felt like he’d been sucker-punched. “...What? When?”

“Long enough ago that I felt guilty not saying anything.” Rocky carefully lowered himself to the floor with a soft thud. “It was the same argument we’d been having. Over children.”

Grace gingerly sat down next to Rocky. “...Are you okay?”

“No. But I don’t have a choice but to be okay, don’t I? …I knew what would happen.”

“You said the timing wasn’t right. Rock, if the timing wasn’t right, that’s all there is to it.”

“I could have made the timing right. I could have taken a leap of faith. I could have done a lot that I didn’t do.” Rocky tapped the floor gently, and Grace imagined that he was watching Iris color the xenonite walls that he built. “...Adrian said some things.”

“About me?”

“Not you personally. Your situation. With Iris. Adrian resented that I’m… present here, with you, with them, when the situation was bad. But Adrian worked to make everything as ideal as possible, and I couldn’t give them the same thing.” Rocky paused, then said, “I think there’s something wrong with me that I couldn’t give that to them.”

Grace didn’t know what to say. He felt responsible for this. Would Rocky have had so much hesitation about having children of his own if none of this had ever happened to Grace? 

Rocky said, “But it wasn’t anything about that that upset me. When Iris said Daddy. When they said that, I realized that Iris is all I will have, now. And I’ll outlive them.”

Grace involuntarily sucked in a breath. He reached over to hug Rocky.

Rocky folded himself into Grace’s arms. “I’ll outlive you, and then I’ll outlive them. How is it possible I’ll outlive them when they’re still so young? They’re an infant. Why does it have to be this way?”

“I don’t know,” Grace breathed. “You know I’d never leave you if I had a choice.”

“Choice,” Rocky echoed. “When have you ever had a choice in anything?”

Grace sat on the beach and watched Iris splash in the ocean. They were naked and their hair was beginning to darken a little bit to more closely match Grace’s dirty blond. Grace felt like every day, he could see more of himself in Iris than the day before.

Iris was learning to swim now that the biodome team had fixed the water temperature. Iris sprinkled protein powder on everything they ate because they liked the gritty texture. Iris’s favorite song was the theme from Civilization IV, and they knew all the words even though they didn’t have a clue what they meant. Iris was beginning to understand part of Grace’s science classes, even when they were way too advanced for them. Iris had friends and a family who loved them.

Iris was happy. Grace wondered if he’d been happy when he was their age. He suspected he hadn’t been.

The pink Eridian ambled down the beach. Grace and Iris both saw them coming. Iris ran out of the water toward Grace. They had been taught a long time ago what to do when they saw the pink Eridian.

“Go up to the house,” Grace said. “Daddy needs to talk to them. It’ll be okay.”

Iris’s expression was full of doubt. But they turned and started running toward the house anyway.

The pink Eridian came to a stop beside Grace. “Did you send them away? I was hoping to say hello.”

Grace watched Iris. They hadn’t gone inside. They stood just a few feet below the door and watched Grace and the pink Eridian from a distance. Grace waved at them just to show he was alright.

“Iris doesn’t like you,” Grace said casually.

“You and Iris both,” the pink Eridian said. “Perhaps I should resign.”

Grace laughed. He bent over and draped his arms over his knees and laughed and laughed.

The pink Eridian politely waited for Grace to settle down.

Grace wiped a tear from his eye. “...You know, Iris has this book of Eridian fables. I read them at bedtime. There’s this one that I bet you’d like.”

“Would you share it?” the pink Eridian asked.

Grace didn’t look at the pink Eridian as he spoke. “I might leave out a detail or two by accident. But the gist of the story is that there’s this poor kid who’s a farmer, along with their whole family. Parents, siblings, grandparents, siblings-of-parents, you know. They work hard. They’re honest people. But they’re poor.

“Anyway, one day the kid who’s at the center of this family decides they want to take a mate. There’s this other Eridian from a richer family they have their eye on, and they ask them to be their mate, and they get turned down because they and their family are poor farmers with little status.

“Well, you know how it goes. They end up finding a different mate. And they build this life and have this family even though they never have enough to go around. And then one day, the original Eridian is walking through the mountains and they find a gemstone with a special resonance, and the resonance makes it possible for them to somehow go back in time and try to build the life they had initially wanted. And they’re appalled at the thought of losing their beautiful family, so they go home thinking about how grateful they are that they get to still be poor.”

There was about a minute of silence.

“Do you think it’s a bad lesson for a fable to impart?” the pink Eridian asked. “That one can find sources of happiness even under unfavorable and unchangeable circumstances?”

“No,” Grace said. “It’s something Iris is gonna have to grapple with, too. They’ll never know life as a normal human. Even if you forget they’re probably the first human clone, they’re gonna grow up totally isolated from any human other than me. They’ll only know Earth and its people through screens and books. I don’t know what it’ll do to them, to be an Eridian in a human suit. Even if they get the chance to meet other humans one day, they probably won’t ever really feel at home with them. And who knows if they’ll ever feel at home on Erid, either. They’re going to have a strange life, and I have to figure out how not to mess it up for them. How to be okay with who they are and what they are.”

There was another short silence.

“But the thing of it is,” Grace said, “it’s a lot easier to accept the unchangeable when it’s because of bad luck instead of being something that someone else inflicted on you. On purpose. Like, yeah, the Ryland Grace I am today would never, ever go back and undo Iris.

“...But I didn’t get to choose to be the person I am today,” Grace said. “I was robbed of who I could have been.”

“Are you sure it’s not a good thing that you’re not that? This version of you may be better for the world.”

“Maybe,” Grace said. “And I know it’s because I’ll always be a little bit of a coward, but deep down, that matters less to me than my own happiness. I don’t think I’ll ever find a way to be okay with it.”

“Well,” the pink Eridian said, “perhaps I can help in some small way, then. I’d like to offer you another choice.”

“A choice?”

“Your choice. Perhaps the choice to better the world at your own expense will be healing to you somehow. Done only with your full understanding and consent this time.”

Understanding crescendoed down Grace’s spine with the speed and the freezing chill of an avalanche. He gaped at the pink Eridian. “I told you I would never do it again.”

“I understand that’s what you said at the time.”

“Then why are you asking!?”

“To ensure it’s your continued choice. You understand it’s to the benefit of all Erid and all Earth for there to be as many humans on Erid as possible. Erid has so much to learn from humanity.”

Grace couldn’t speak. He couldn’t believe this monster was standing in front of him, asking him to choose to voluntarily subject himself to the worst violation of his life again. Eva Stratt had killed him and she didn’t damage him half as deeply.

“If your choice is no,” The pink Erdian said, “we will respect that. You will not be bothered about it again.”

Grace stared at the pink Eridian.

Iris was still standing on the hill, watching them. 

Understanding befell. It arrived like a gunshot to the head, and the shock was so terrible that Grace couldn’t feel very much of anything beyond it.

“No,” Grace uttered. “You can’t.”

“Everything we agreed to will continue to be expected,” The pink Eridian said as if remarking on the weather. “You will never be forced to carry another pregnancy. Your clone won’t begin their work until they reach the age of majority. Eighteen Earth years.”

Grace couldn’t bring himself to fully conceptualize what that meant beyond the obvious. What it would do to Iris. How they might suffer.

“There’s no need to rush,” the pink Eridian said. “You don’t have to decide here. Why don’t you take a month to think about it? Make sure you make the correct choice.”

“I’ll do it,” Grace said. With a numb horror slow to form, he thought it was better to get it over with straight away instead of needlessly agonizing over it for a month.

“Oh, good,” the pink Eridian said. “You made the correct choice.”

Grace knelt in the sand. In a few hours, he’d start realizing the further implications of what he had agreed to. He would wonder how he was supposed to tell Rocky that in another few months, there would be another child he’d love and outlive just like Iris. He would wonder how he was supposed to protect Iris from his misery and his resentment as he struggled through a repeat of the event which had created them.

He’d think about all the pieces of himself that were chipped away during his last pregnancy, some of which he found again, some of which he didn’t. He wondered how much of himself he would lose this time around. He wondered how many times it would take until he wound up a version of Ryland Grace he couldn’t recognize as himself.

“...Is the facial recognition software functioning?”

“It’s thinking… thinking… oh, wow. The computer’s 96% percent certain it’s a match.”

“Whoa. Oh my god.”

“Yeah. …Yeah.”

“Jesus, Charlie. There’s gonna be worldwide celebrations in the streets. He made it.”

“He made it.”

“And they kept him alive. They saved his life.”

“Emma, Emma, I’ve got the translation program reading the audio file. They’re talking about him like he’s Jesus Christ to them. They’re calling him the most beloved being on the entire planet.”

“Oh my god. I always hoped. I used to think about him when I was a kid in school. How he went back for Rocky. I always hoped they made it back to Erid together. I always hoped they were good to him.”

“...”

“I’ve got to tell my dad. My sister.”

“...Emma?”

“Yeah?”

“There are other humans with him.”

“...What?”

“Yeah…”

“How?”

“...The facial recognition says they’re all Ryland Grace. All of them.”

“What? Like they cloned him?”

“Maybe?”

“That’s so weird. I’m imagining a room full of tubes full of Ryland Grace clones. Do you think it’s plausible Eridians figured out something like that before humans did? For humans?”

“Hmm. I bet half the medical division are already analyzing it and trying to figure out what we’re looking at.”

“Is it obvious which one is the real Ryland Grace?”

“Yeah. They’re all young except for him.

“Wow. I bet I’ll see it sooner than it’s on the news, but I’m sort of jealous you get to see him before I do. How does he look?”

Later, the first images of Ryland Grace to arrive on the Eridian probe would appear on screens and in print all over the planet Earth. Charlie Tan’s initial captioning was often attached. Doctor Ryland Grace appears at ease. He is smiling in an approximation of happiness.