Work Text:
“Did Teacher Grace ever lay an egg, question?” asked Patient-Song. Patient-Song had waited strategically until the class was working on different reproductive strategies to ask this, although it had actually wanted to know for a while.
Teacher Grace angled its face to Patient-Song, raising its overeye fur and exposing more of its eye jelly so it could hear all of Patient-Song’s light. It did that when you asked a really good question.
“No, buddy, I’m a mammal. That means we have fur, produce milk, and give birth to live young. Kind of like deepsea carlathomites here on Erid, right?” It was pressing keys on its communication device more quickly than usual, and “chest blood mixture for infant” came out “fluid (generic) for diminutive person.”
Patient-Song wrote this down in the super-secret code that only it and Underground-Echo and Small-Delight knew.
This was going to be so important to the Manuscript.
****
The Secret Manuscript had mostly begun when Small-Delight, who was very interested in romance lately, had asked Teacher Grace if it had a mate on Earth. Because Teacher Grace was the only human on Erid, right? And it was super great! It had played Earth songs in class for a treat and knew lots about light and evolution and reliably went off topic to talk about human things.
It obviously deserved a really good mate, one who could fight off an Earth sea predator animal and also juggle and fly spaceships.
Disappointingly, Teacher Grace had no mate and no family and no small companion carnivore. That was a good thing, it said, because that meant it had been selected to beat the astrophages.
But it didn’t seem fair to Small-Delight. Teacher Grace had to talk through an electronic keyboard because its mouth wasn’t shaped for normal Eridian speech, and couldn’t breathe normal air or hold claws with anyone or hang out in the staffroom doing whatever boring grownup stuff the other teachers did.
It was such a lonely way to live. Small-Delight had eight parents and five siblings and two best friends and one favourite teacher, and if anyone had told it that it could never see any of them ever again it would get so sad it would probably die.
Small-Delight explained this at length to Patient-Song and Underground-Echo in their secret hiding spot (in the kellethor bush that was currently behind the sports equipment shed). It had to take breaks, because it got loud when it was emotional and Teacher Constant-Inquiry had thought it was hurt the first time it started. It had to pretend it was playing a pretend game, which obviously Small-Delight wasn’t actually doing because Small-Delight wasn’t a pebble.
“Well maybe it had, you know, a secret mate,” suggested Patient-Song. “And it couldn’t tell the Earth space programme about it or it couldn’t go to space.”
“Do you really think so, question?” and Underground-Echo’s voice was hushed and reverent. A thousand possibilities had just bloomed in its mind. Underground-Echo always got good marks for Creative Writing- its latest story was about a secret society of people with magic powers who travelled the galaxy. A lot of kids really liked writing stories about space travel, so many that Teacher Pleasant-Contemplation had wearily asked if maybe just one person could write a story set on Erid for a change.
“I don’t really think it, but I think maybe it could have happened. And if it did, we have to think about it. That’s responsible journalism!” Patient-Song was vibrating in excitement. The kellethor bush, mistaking Patient-Song’s movement for a glanit coming to feed, wrapped hopeful sapvines around its carapace. There was a brief pause in the conversation as all three of them had to wrestle the feeding-vines away. Plants are not polite like people, and eat outside in the open. Sometimes they get confused about what’s food and what isn’t.
The trio started a list of what they knew about Teacher Grace’s planet. It’s important to do research when you write fiction, so that it sounds accurate to the reader.
Bilateral instead of radial symmetry on organisms, extremely cold but not for humans, people who liked each other brought each other food (“Teacher Grace eats its own proteins to stay healthy, I think it would feed them to someone it liked,” suggested Underground-Echo), hearing with eyes, exciting pictures about explosions because the atmosphere was very flammable, and getting sleepy when the sun was not visible.
The first draft looked like this:
Teacher Grace lived on Earth, and was not cold at a temperature of 300 Kelvin even though a normal person would be. This was because Teacher Grace was not normal. Teacher Grace was going to save two planets!
“Earth Space Thrum, I would like to go to space please to stop the sun going dark. It’s extremely cold here but it’s going to get colder,” and its eye jelly got wet due to its extreme misery when it was thinking about all the human pebbles that would freeze to death.
“Okay, Teacher Grace,” replied the Earth Space Thrum. “But you can only go if you don’t have a mate.”
Teacher Grace inhaled lots of oxygen very fast because it did have a mate! But it would be so good at being in space!
“I actually don’t have a mate,” it lied. Its mate was standing next to it and started leaking sadness water.
“Okay good,” sang all the humans. “Bye, have fun in space,” and they put Teacher Grace in a spaceship.
Then its mate exploded because of the flammable Earth atmosphere.
Small-Delight smacked Underground-Echo. “Stop it! It didn’t explode! There should be romance, and stuff.” Underground-Echo did not like romance as much as Small-Delight; Small-Delight was basically being discriminated against for having good taste.
“Well, you have to have some excitement in a story,” said Underground-Echo sulkily. “Stuff explodes on Earth all the time because of the oxygen, that’s why they have combustion-fighting-vehicles in all their cities. So it’s very scientific that I put in the mate exploding, actually.”
“You can have explosions and romance,” put in Patient-Song, ever the peacemaker. “That’s balance. We just need to give Teacher Grace’s mate some character traits, and maybe a name, or it’s not romantic and it’s just sad.”
“Alright, it’s… it’s a combustion-fighter, and it doesn’t want Teacher Grace to go to space because if Earth’s sun doesn’t work there’s no spontaneous combustion and people will be safe from the oxygen atmosphere,” Underground-Echo negotiated. “And maybe they meet when Teacher Grace gets stuck in a combustion, and has to be rescued.”
“Right!” said Patient-Song, and wrote: Teacher Grace was walking along on Earth when a combustion started, because on Earth humans need to combust their food to make it safe to eat but it explodes if this is performed incorrectly.
Underground-Echo paused. “What address does a combustion-fighter use, question?” Teacher Grace used scholar’s address to talk to their class, which was kind of cool because it was like they were grownups.
Usually the only time an adult used anything other than familiar address was when they were being sarcastic, like when a teacher asked the respected scholars to be so good as to refrain from jumping off the roof all the time. Even though it hadn’t even been Small-Delight’s idea and Small-Delight was trying to tell off the other kids, actually.
But a combustion-fighter wasn’t a profession that existed on Erid, so they had to think about it a bit.
“It could be a maintenance pronoun, if they help build the houses again after they stop combusting,” Small-Delight offered dubiously. “Or if they give first aid, it could be medical, I guess.”
Patient-Song wrote in, “I am a combustion-fighter,” with medical pronouns, a little bit ahead of where they had already written. Medical was definitely more romantic than maintenance.
Then it flipped back to where it was and wrote that the combustion was in a human crèche, and everyone was either too eggbound to run away or tiny human pebbles, so Teacher Grace had to run into the combustion and rescue everyone.
But then Teacher Grace got stuck! The combustion was too hot and Teacher Grace started to shrivel and some of the human pebbles died! It was getting extremely exciting for everyone when the bell for the end of breaktime rang.
The mundane realities of school life had no respect for the literary masterpiece that was being created.
Small-Delight sulked all the way through Geography.
***
“Is it weird that we’re writing about a person we know for real, question?” asked Patient-Song, after school.
It was probably not weird, because of Spaceship Pals Forever! That was an artecho for pebbles about Teacher Grace and Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home being friends in space, with cartoony depictions of them holding claws and breeding taumoeba. It had been written to explain new scientific discoveries to kids, back when everyone thought Teacher Grace was probably going to die of malnutrition soon. You could sort of tell- Teacher Grace was portrayed as a kind of silly gross alien who didn’t do much except for be impressed at Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home, and it ended by saying Teacher Grace had a short lifespan compared to a person but it really enjoyed being friends with Eridians. You could buy it at the Biological Amazement Museum’s gift shop, alongside an anatomical model of Teacher Grace and a diagram version of Teacher Grace’s ship, the Desperate Prayer (connotations of velocity).
Joy-in-Movement had brought Spaceship Pals Forever! to Teacher Grace’s classroom to be a little bit annoying probably (Joy-in-Movement was always a little bit annoying), and Teacher Grace had said lots of stuff in the artecho hadn’t actually happened, or hadn’t happened like that. There had been no big crowd of humans singing a farewell. It had all been less polite than the artist had imagined.
People like to make up that science is less frustrating than it actually is, Teacher Grace had said.
Teacher Grace couldn’t sense artechoes properly, and had to have the artecho read to it. Its eyes were extra big and extra leaky in the artecho. Its mouth was shown very small or conveniently muffled by other objects a lot, because it was an audiotext for kids and you couldn’t just show someone’s cavity, even if it was right there. Also, it kind of suggested that humans were psychic because Teacher Grace had given Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home a name that meant the same thing in Human, when that had just been coincidence. Small-Delight was 98% certain Teacher Grace would have mentioned if it could read minds by now.
Teacher Grace had eyesensed it for a long time before asking Joy-in-Movement to put the artecho away, please.
It made Small-Delight feel kind of weird. Like, if Small-Delight went to Earth, would they think that it sounded creepy? Teacher Grace was kind of creepy-sounding, the first time Small-Delight had heard it and all its tubes gurgling, but it had got used to the sound of Teacher Grace’s endoskeleton eventually.
“Teacher Grace isn’t the same as a real person, though,” Patient-Song pointed out. “There’s three different audios about it. And a statue. If you have a statue, you gotta expect some romances and stuff, extremely emphatic statement.”
The audios also mostly ended when Teacher Grace and Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home landed back on Erid, and maybe had a little bit about building Teacher Grace’s home. They didn’t mention that Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home was basically a weird shut-in now who got freaked out by crowds after spending more than Small-Delight’s entire lifespan in space, or that its carapace was all messed up from being in zero gravity for so long.
Neither it nor Teacher Grace would probably live to their average lifespan, and Teacher Grace’s was short to begin with.
“And it’s not like we’re saying it’s really true,” Small-Delight pointed out. “Author Shared-Discovery got yelled at a lot by Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home for making stuff up in Spaceship Pals Forever! It didn’t ask before sculpting the artecho, I guess.”
“That’s why we make sure Engineer Music-Suggesting-Foundations-of-Home never ever finds out about this, ever,” Underground-Echo said firmly. None of them wanted to be yelled at by the hero of a whole entire planet. Small-Delight could build an entire second spaceship all by itself and find two other alien species and the main thing people would still know about it was exactly how much yelling there had been.
“Agreed.”
“Totally.”
****
The Manuscript was written in code and passed between Small-Delight, Patient-Song, and Underground-Echo at school as though it was contraband. It was a bit of a compromise between the three of them. Underground-Echo kept writing about how machines would work on Earth with their lighter gravity and frigid atmosphere and didn’t care about character development hardly at all, Patient-Song kept theorising about how different biologies would make human society work differently, and Small-Delight was basically writing a romance that happened to be about aliens.
Small-Delight had read all about literary conventions, and to write the best romance ever it was going to use as many as possible.
“Earth spider animals are so beautiful and intelligent,” Teacher Grace said compassionately to Combustion-Fighter. A thrum of spider animals was going by on the street as it said this. “I wish there was a way I could talk to them and teach them about magnetism.” That was called foreshadowing. Small-Delight had added that bit.
“Teacher Grace, you were hurt in the combustion. Here, I have brought you some of my stem cells so you can perform allogeneic CAR-T cell therapy to regrow your external membrane. There will be no host-versus-graft reactions which is usually a concern because I did chemotherapy to you in your sleep, suppressing your neutrophils,” said Combustion-Fighter. This was in Underground-Echo’s writing.
“Also, I am gestating a baby human inside of me, because we touched genitals or something and I am female,” said Combustion-Fighter. “Humans are sexually dimorphic like how livestock animals are, and someone else might find that weird and gross but I am human so I just think it’s normal.” Teacher Grace had mixed emotions about this. It was pleased that it had done sex, but human females are much bigger and stronger than human males because they have extra organs to fit a child inside, and also they eat more when they are gravid. Obviously Teacher Grace knew other males who had been eaten by their mates accidentally in the throes of gestation hunger. This was very sad. Sometimes females just grabbed males and went chomp and they weren’t even that hungry. This was because due to their weaker size and inability to grow babies males were less valued in human society. So Teacher Grace was given less money than a female and everyone thought it was incapable and laughed at it.
“Yes that is normal,” Teacher Grace agreed. “I will bring you lots of food so you don’t accidentally eat me, such as a bread and a coffee and a kfc.”
Patient-Song had gone on like this for multiple paragraphs and was seriously considering a career in bioanthropology. Small-Delight and Underground-Echo both thought it was kind of gross to bring up that Teacher Grace was dimorphic, but Patient-Song’s family farmed rolkesh so it knew all about dimorphic courting. It hadn’t even made Teacher Grace fuse to Combustion-Fighter’s side and shrivel up after copulating to provide nutrients for their young the way male rolkesh did. It could have been way grosser!
Probably human society had invented some medicines to make its males not do that.
“You can’t write that stuff yet, they haven’t even sung for each other or anything!” insisted Small-Delight, trying to flatten Patient-Song’s writing. Patient-Song pushed the words up again, although some of the logograms got kind of pushed around and “genital” started to feel like “cavity (nonspecific)”.
“Well, you write that bit, then!” Patient-Song pulled Small-Delight off the manuscript. “Underground-Echo and I are going to write the best part. We’re going to write Teacher Grace going to SPACE.”
****
Suddenly the human scientists noticed that the Poynting-Robertson effect had lessened. The Poynting-Robertson effect is when solar radiation makes a dust grain orbiting a star lose angular momentum, and it’s very interesting and I think I am mostly explaining it right. Also radio signals suddenly got better because the Earth’s atmosphere is very thin and radio signals are affected by solar flares, and because the sun was dimming there were less of those. “Wow what is happening here,” said the human astronomers.
“Maybe the sun is being eaten, maybe by some life from another planet! We need the best scientists to look at this!” And they got all the best scientists, although they thought that maybe Teacher Grace would not be good at science because it was male. “You should be fertilising eggs,” they said meanly.
“I might be a male, but I am also a biologist and I can help!” Teacher Grace said bravely.
It studied all of the astrophage using a machine to increase the intensity of light rays. “These are alive and they are eating our sun,” said Teacher Grace.”
“Oh no,” said everyone. “We will need to launch some people into space. But how will we do that.”
“Maybe we will use a bi-elliptic transfer which uses two half-elliptic orbits and the third of three burns being performed at the periapsis of the radius of the final desired orbit,” suggested one scientist.
“No I think we should put the spaceship we made into an elliptical transfer orbit tangential to both the initial and target orbits,” said a different scientist. “That will potentially mean less travel time, but it will depend on how big the first orbit is compared to the second orbit.”
At this point Patient-Song had to wrestle the manuscript away from Underground-Song, who was clearly going to start writing out the vis-viva equation, and then it would stop being a romance and start being a physics textbook.
“Put its mate in there!” Patient-Song pleaded. They were whispering in Underground-Echo’s bedroom, because Underground-Echo had a mean older sibling that made fun of Underground-Echo’s friends sometimes and spent all its time being boring and not even caring about aliens.
“It’s coming, hang on!”
Combustion-Fighter was very gravid and fighting some combustions near the thrum Teacher Grace was in. Teacher Grace was worried the human babies would not get enough nutrition so it cultured its cells into food using foetal bovine serum and glass microcarriers and also got some blood from its coolant network to feed to its mate.
“Thank you,” said Combustion-Fighter, and it finished fighting the combustion. Everyone said thank you and Combustion-Fighter treated their wounds from combustion.
“It is hard to find food right now because the dimmed sun means the plants we eat cannot photosynthesise. I am very hungry all the time. I am trying very hard not to eat you but I should probably live in a different place until the babies come out or until there is more food.” The food shortage meant the human females were thinking about eating their males. Teacher Grace had to cover itself in things humans cannot ingest like cadmium and mercury so nobody ate it.
“But I like you very much. I don’t mind so much if you eat me,” and Teacher Grace bravely took off all the condiments it was wearing. It was shaking from fear. “No I don’t want to, you are more useful doing biology. I will eat another human I like less. I like you too much to be close to you right now.” Combustion-Fighter turned away from Teacher Grace, and Teacher Grace reached out a limb to stop it.
“I came to tell you I have been selected to go on the Desperate Prayer (connotations of velocity). Which is as far away from you as it is possible to be. Please put eye shields on the babies if they are also hatched with damaged eyes.”
And they both leaked eye water.
Small-Delight, running its hand over Patient-Song and Underground-Echo’s pages, got extremely emotional and had to hide in Underground-Echo’s eating room for a little while, giving off little squeaks.
“I think this is probably the best literature ever written,” it said when it came back. “I think we might be geniuses, statement.”
“Well, obviously I am,” Underground-Echo said dismissively. “You two can also be co-geniuses, I guess.” For Underground-Echo, politeness was something for other people.
Patient-Song was not listening. It was lost in contemplation. “Do you think maybe the other humans brought Teacher Grace along for food, question? But they accidentally died first? And then Teacher Grace had to eat them?”
“Oooh, add that in, it’s irony,” Small-Delight instructed.
All the astronauts were female and they got Teacher Grace into the ship for if they ran out of food. Teacher Grace didn’t tell its mate that. It wanted to help but it was only allowed to be food and they kept it in the kitchen. But then they all died of space diseases and Teacher Grace was the only one left.
And it ate them.
“No, it’s gotta be, you know, artistic and stuff. There should be pathos as well,” Small-Delight insisted.
“What’s pathos?” asked Patient-Song.
“Oh, I know this one- it’s when there’s an audio about someone dying in a war and everyone shows up to say it sucks that they’re dying in a war, but they’re very brave the whole time and lie and say it actually doesn’t suck,” Underground-Echo said wisely. It was basically an expert on this kind of thing because one of its parents wrote plays.
“Alright,” Patient-Song agreed, and added ‘It actually isn’t sad that I am going to space, and I won’t be sad up there because I will be thinking about the Earth’s sun,’ to Teacher Grace’s earlier dialogue sequence with Combustion-Fighter. Underground-Echo edited, and made Teacher Grace use the old-timey humble-servant pronouns that nobody used non-sarcastically anymore except in old poems, to make it clear that Teacher Grace was having to be the servant of all the humans.
Small-Delight added eyeleaking noises coming from Teacher Grace and Combustion-Fighter. Humans were leaky animals.
The manuscript was nearly sixteen thousand words long when it was finished. It had cannibalism and anthropology and orbital velocity calculations. Teacher Grace had a secret evil sametimehatchmate that looked exactly like it. Combustion-Fighter got amnesia and mated the hatchmate instead but knew something was wrong and ate Evil Teacher Grace.
It was a masterpiece.
“We can’t ever let anyone hear this ever, we have to hide it somewhere,” said Small-Delight.
They buried the manuscript under the kellethor bush at school for symbolic reasons, the roots spiralling around trying to eat it and vines whipping at them.
“We can come back when we’re famous authors, and we can publish the Manuscript as juvenilia if we change the names probably,” suggested Patient-Song.
“Absolutely!” agreed Small-Delight. And they all made a solemn vow, about friendship and curiosity and artistic integrity and whatnot.
****
120 years later, Scholar Small-Delight awoke thrumming in embarrassment.
Why in all the names of virtue had it buried its old story about Teacher Grace under something that moved through soil?