Archive of Our Own

I would be lying if I said I wasn't curious.

Not even in the fluttery, sappy way I'd been at the start, when Rocky had first told me he was going to be a dad. In the scientific way. The desire for knowledge itched under my skin, in the same way it had when I'd first been learning about astrophage. I wasn't gonna be studying the little tykes, I wasn't that inhumane— but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited to at least see what they looked like.

"They have been waiting for you," Adrian trilled, the beam of my flashlight sending rainbowy refractions off their opalescent carapace as they moved. "My heart-song can't wait for you to see them. I know every parent says this, but our pebbles are extremely cute. Every single one is absolutely perfect. The cutest on all of Erid."

Adrian was leading me toward their nesting place, through the network of caves that served as a kind of subterranean walkway on Erid. It was probably quicker for them to navigate on the surface, but I'd never really gotten the hang of it. The "streets" of Erid were designed to be navigated by a race of beings that could happily scale ninety-degree-vertical surfaces and dangle upside-down. It wasn't exactly an ideal environment for a guy like me, especially not when I had to walk around it in a heavy, clumsy exosuit with that day's allowance of breathable air on my back.

"Grace happy see them too!"

Adrian answered me with a pleased hum.

Rocky had a near-fluent understanding of my language, but Adrian, not so much— so I spoke Eridian with them. Sort of. I could replicate just enough of the sounds involved to get across the basics of what I was thinking, but it was incredibly rudimentary compared to what I could do with a keyboard. Even that wasn't as far as the Eridians got— I was starting to get better at unpicking the layers of vocalisation they packed into every word, and Rocky hadn't been kidding when he called the language "information dense".

Adrian was calling their babies cute, yes. But there were twining under- and over-tones blended into the part of the word I could have any hope of speaking. Cute but also soft and, most curiously, a pronoun. Like you.

"Pebbles… like Grace?" I had to lean against the wall then, plodding up a sharp incline Adrian navigated with ease. "Like Grace how?"

"Our pebbles are cute, cute, cute! They look like you, they'll know your voice— Rocky showed them recordings, so they might recognise you." Adrian led me up a gently sloping stretch of tunnel. I had to duck through the door at the end— even though Adrian was nearly twice as tall as Rocky, I had some height on them just by virtue of our respective body plans. "I'm sure you'll adore them, they remind me so much more of your earth animals at this stage…"

I thought all of my students were cute, cute, cute, too, as I had on Earth— but the implication there was something more familiar about the new-born form of them was interesting. Maybe they were morphologically different somehow, or had fur, or feathers, or resembled tetrapods like I'd gotten used to back home. It was maybe rude to look at someone's beautiful newborn children and start trying to fit them into the eridian equivalent of the tree of life, but I had some serious questions about the skills of Eridian taxonomists and this was going to yield some fascinating answers.

And, I couldn't lie to myself. I wanted to see Rocky happy.

I followed Adrian across their dwelling, dodging incomprehensible pieces of furniture as they swung into the beam of my flashlight. At first, I had wondered why Rocky was insistent on visiting me in the biodome, rather than the other way around. Then I'd finally actually made it to his place and immediately got entangled in one of the hammock-looking seating nets and realised why.

"Here we are."

Adrian had stopped in front of an arched doorway, covered only with a thick, shimmering curtain. I felt suddenly nervous to the point of nausea, the significance hitting me all at once.

I didn't actually know that much about Eridian reproductive behaviour. I'd got the health-class level overview and that was it. Both parents traded off watching the eggs, with at least one clutchmate watching the parents and bringing food and the like. There was a breakdown of privacy and social rules, creating a network of relatives who were "allowed" near the nest.

I was very lucky to be within that network.

"Song of my heart, how are they?" Adrian was singing so, so softly. Even across the language barrier, I could tell the sounds were full of love."Our Grace is here to see you."

"Grace!" Rocky's happy trill echos from the darkness inside. "Grace, come see them! They're so perfect."

"Okay, okay!" He sounded a little tired, but what new parent wouldn't be?

There was a small step down into the room on the other side of the doorway. The floor seemed to be dirt, slightly soft beneath my feet, and the walls were natural rock. The floor sloped downward. Like Earth's mammals, Eridians had originally descended from burrowing creatures.

Now I was closer, I could see a very faint, reddish glow— a heat lamp?

I took a risk, and I turned off my flashlight. The dim glow was just enough for me to see by, like the lights they used outside observatories on earth to preserve night vision. Everything went red and black and shimmering sharp dark colours where there were crystalline inclusions in the stone. It was in that light that I first glimpsed Rocky, and…

What the fudge were those?

My first thought was that I was looking at some kind of strange, alien plant. It looked more like that than anything recognisable as an animal. Rocky was curled up in front of a heap of stones, looking incredibly pleased with himself. And from that heap sprouted…

I couldn't even tell what I was looking at, at first. There was a thin, white netting shimmering slick across the stones like some kind of slime mold, mycelial-looking roots crawling across the ground and up the walls. Rising from it were… stalks? Stems? Five of them, about as thick around as the body of a beer bottle, silvery-clear, each bulging grotesquely at the end before exploding into feathery, translucent tendrils.

When I took a step closer, every single one twitched towards me.

I tried really, really hard to find some nice words. Really! I wanted to tell Rocky and Adrian that they were gorgeous, beautiful, didn't remind me of some kind of horrifying carnivorous hivemind at all! But I was stuck standing, mouth open, noticing detail after detail. The stalks had central tubes running through them like shrimp, dark clumps of I-don't-want-to-know visible inside. The tendrils waved faintly as if in a nonexistent breeze. My brain kept reaching for a frame of reference and pulling up images of anemones and jellyfish and sticky, carnivorous sundews.

"Grace is awestruck," Rocky stated, chittering smugly. "Our Pebbles are much more beautiful than ugly leaky human babies."

"Yeah, bud." I finally found my voice. "Do- will they mind if I turn my flashlight back on?"

I needed to see where the network of creeping roots ended, because I had a horrifying feeling that they'd twirl around my feet and drag me down if I stepped near them. I could just about make out that it burrowed down into the messy collection of rocks, and dug into the walls— probably, that was how they were anchoring themselves.

"It's allowable." Adrian hummed. The colony spasmed towards their voice in a discordant, uncoordinated lurch. "Oh, my sweet harmonies, don't worry, I'm here."

Adrian moved closer to the heap, reached out so tenderly to brush their claws against one of the bulbous shapes.Its feathery tendrils wobbled, flailing, and found them, writhing against their extended limb. I realised with a start that it was touching back.

Okay, that was maybe a little cute cute cute.

Adrian settled slowly to the ground, and Rocky scooted closer to lean against them. In the white beam of my flashlight, I could see similar ocean-coloured glints in the heap of rock. Molted pieces of their carapaces?

"You can sing to them," Rocky said. "If you'd like."

I felt myself tearing up. My Eridian students had talked about this, once, one of the younger ones bursting with excitement at the honour of signing to its newly-hatched siblings. I had imagined the siblings as a little more Eridian-shaped, but that didn't take away from the massive expression of trust.

"Are you sure?"

A rippling movement towards my voice. I could see the shimmer of silvery mercury-based blood in the veins beside five tiny digestive tracts, twenty-five rapidly fluttering things that I slowly realised were half-formed hearts. It was disturbingly like seeing inside of an embryo.

"Certain."

"Oh jeez. Okay, uhm," I'd never known that many lullabies. The kids I interacted with were usually a bit past that. "Can— can I sit with you?"

More fluttering, and a hum of assent from Rocky. Suddenly I was intensely aware of how fragile the little things were, soft to the point of looking skinless. I settled on the ground, and up close, I could make out a slight wavy edge to the bulbous cups at the end of each stalk. Five little budding parts, like the beginning of limbs.

"Hi," I breathed, as if they could understand me. The ripple seemed a little less intimidating this time, now I knew it was coming. "I hope you like human music…"

It took me a minute to come up with a song that I knew well enough to be worth a rendition. I didn't want to traumatise the poor little things with my off-key screeching. The last time I'd made any serious effort to sing had been—

"The electro-magnetic spectrum is, just a name…" I began, my eyes flicking to Rocky and Adrian to look for their approval. "Of a range of radiation, let me tell you what they are…"

As I sang, the pebbles swayed towards me like kelp in a current. Nervous to damage them, I tentatively extended one hand, and then watched as the wispy trailing limbs wrapped around it. I could feel my voice bouncing off the rough-hewn walls, buzzing and deep in my chest. When the song ended, I couldn't bring myself to stop— I had to spend longer with them. As I started over, Rocky and Adrian joined in, raising sonorous, wind-chime voices to harmonise with mine.

For a moment, it was perfect. It felt as though everything I had given up had been leading just towards that moment. I knew cognitively that humans will pack-bond with just about anything, that my body was probably just about drowning itself in oxytocin in response to the first taste of community it had gotten in months, but they were so soft and tiny and clumsy, reaching for me with all the grace a human neonate might.

Then the song ended, and Rocky startled a little bit.

"Don't let them touch your exosuit with those parts," he groused, gesturing at the wispy tentacles creeping up my wrist. "Cute new pebbles are hungry, hungry, hungry, and xenonite isn't good for them to eat."

"Oh my gosh." I wiggled my fingers, prodding and peeling until the delicate tendrils were off.

Remembered, grinning, how human babies shoved just about everything in their mouths.

Later, Rocky would explain to me how eridians forged their shells, absorbing minerals from everything around them. Including their not-parent-cluster-member's hands, if left to their their own devices. I thought it was sweet, in a way, that they'd try and pick up on everything around them. In all other ways I thought it was terrifying.

It didn't occur to me until that evening, to wonder.

What the heck had Adrian meant, that the pebbles looked like me?