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Rocky's voice is in an octave so low that some parts of his song dip beneath Grace's range of hearing. It sounds a little like how he remembers walkie-talkie chatter with the Hail Mary team, words hacked to pieces from heavy radio interference. “None viable again,” Rocky's saying, and god, he looks so small.
He's in his xenonite ball today instead of his form-fitting exosuit — the one that sheathes him like a glove and allows him to interact better with Grace and the biodome's internals –- which means he wants the distance. The ball is gently sunken into the white sand of the engineered seashore, and Rocky's nearly flattened against the bottom of it, legs folded over his carapace like a paper fortune-teller. He's so still it could pass for sleep.
“One egg lasted VI days, thought would finally survive full incubation period,” he rattles out, staticked and slow. “Wrong wrong wrong.”
Every instinct in Grace is screaming for him to reach out and stroke that clear shell, to try and give Rocky even the ghost of a comfort, but he can take a freaking hint. And heck, wouldn't he feel patronized half to death if that were him? Oh, your dozenth attempt at having a family catastrophically failed? There, there, you'll feel better tomorrow. Want a hug to cheer you up?
His Rocky deserves better than the platitudes you give a tantruming toddler.
The two of them have been meeting on the beach, these days. The sand soothes Grace's failing joints, and the sloshing waves along the shore — mechanically induced by soundwaves from underwater speakers owing to moonless Erid's lack of tidal forces, a charming work of engineering — produce a rhythmic rush that Rocky finds relaxing, too. Grace imagines Rocky tuning out the echoes of the rest of the world with how he's shielding his carapace, focusing solely on the water's gain and retreat. A lone point of contact in a world he can't breathe.
“I'm sorry,” he says finally, an insignificant scratch of sound that disappears, ashamed, into the sky.
“Not — not understand,” Rocky continues, a little higher now, his body shuddering. “Try Vℓ times, all failure failure failure. Eridian mating sometimes fail, but not this much. This much unprecedented. Thought location, temperature, time of year problems in previous attempts — fixed all, Grace know Rocky and Adrian work to fix all, and still failure, still.”
Grace fidgets with his hands, stretching each knuckle and palming the free edge of each nail, to keep from throwing himself onto Rocky and howling like an animal.
(Because somewhere along the way, Rocky and Adrian's wish for kids had become Grace's own, too.
He'd signed off on the idea, of course, because the polyamorous Eridians prefer the consent of all involved mates before producing any offspring, but he'd initially filed it away as his mates' side project to deal with. He wasn't involved in the babymaking, after all; wouldn't need to help incubate or care for the freshly-hatched litter, would have remarkably little to contribute to any growth and development needs at all beyond some teaching, of course... and it killed him, it killed him, but it was all right.
That's the relationship he's always had with kids, right? He doesn't feed or clothe them, doesn't sing them to sleep at night, doesn't care for them when they're sick, doesn't keep a photo album of their growth from immobile spud to adulthood on his mantel. He just meets them for a slim portion of the day, adds a little more information into their spinning brains, and bids them farewell.
So it should be fine that that's realistically all Rocky and Adrian's hatchlings will ever be to him, near-indistinguishable from his youngest students. But one day, his mates had visited in the ammonia-pressurized tunnels of his house, a thin rock tablet clutched in two green claws, and Adrian had shown Grace the little schematic they'd carved. It involved extensive modifications to the house and biodome to make it a comfortable living space for Eridians, not just a hallway chain for visitation, along with some robotics that Grace didn't quite follow. He had asked what all the changes were for and Adrian—
—Adrian had tilted their carapace sweetly and said, “For reside together, hatchlings and all parents,” and Rocky had added, “Grace seem confused, even though humans also live with human hatchlings; Grace stupid, question?”---
—and, well. His doubts said one thing and his heart screamed another from then on.
And he'd try and try to convince himself not to get attached to the idea of parenthood, that it'd realistically never work out… and then he'd see a plum-sized Eridian with legs like Adrian's or a hue like Rocky's riding atop its parent, and all his progress would be undone.)
Grace's hands hurt from how hard he's flexing them.
“Worry worry worry,” Rocky's murmuring. “Something wrong with cells and reproductive process, question? Rocky exposed to radiation in majority of ship before join Grace in Hail Mary, egg failure is consequence, question? Retribution for Rocky being sole survivor of ship is forever this failure, ques—”
“Hey! Don't entertain a thought like that.” Grace glances back at Rocky, whose claws ball and unfurl now on top of the shivering. God, he looks desolate. “Whatever's going on that’s causing this, it's not your fault, okay? It's most likely not the result of radiation — your scientists tested for that when we landed, remember? — and it's definitely not because you deserve to suffer for surviving. Who even gave you a stupid idea like that?”
“...Illogical Grace and Earth culture tainting Eridian society, giving everyone bad ideas,” comes Rocky's reply. Grace has learned by now to hear it as you're right. His lips twitch with what wants to be a smile.
And the scientist in him absolutely whirs.
“Eridians don't struggle with reproduction a lot, do they?” he asks, soft enough so Rocky knows he can ignore the line of questioning if he wants to.
“Not this kind of struggle,” Rocky warbles. “Some Eridians struggle. Scientists look at egg cells, see mistakes. ♫ ♫ ♪ too much or not enough, improper ♫ ♪ ♬ or ♫ ♪ ♫. Can be fixed with nutrition, temperature, other changes. But scientists look at Rocky and Adrian eggs, all fine. Nothing to fix.”
Grace doesn't know those technical words, but he can tell from context and the general chord patterns involved that Rocky's describing cellular contents. Organelles, cytoplasm, chromatin — broad strokes that humans were observing with the microscopic advancements of the mid-20th century.
That doesn't bode well for his “it's not radiation” theory. Little else is quite so capable of the base-pair mutations that'll incapacitate gametes or embryonic cells without any visible aberrations. But if it’s mutated DNA that's the problem, well, Eridian science is still brand-new even to reliable genome sequencing, and a large-scale therapy for Rocky and Adrian's infertility will likely stay unavailable for decades. He's been consulting with Eridian laboratories enough to know that for a fact.
...Grace remembers, for no particular reason, that his undergraduate research capstone focused on gene modification in mammalian stem cells. He could recite the procedure from memory.
And he shouldn't. God, he'd be an idiot for trying. He lucked out with astrophages thanks to their exceedingly straightforward biology, but this is a problem for Earth's best and brightest scientists, not a washed-up ex-molecular biologist with a laboratory half-pulverized by his spaceflight's excess G-forces.
But he might just be the only inhabitant of Erid right now that can come close. And seeing Rocky like this —- collapsed, defeated, heartbroken — and the ache in his own chest, sucking like a wormhole, not to mention—
“Does Adrian know?”
Rocky taps his fists together. “Not told Adrian yet. Not know how. ...Difficult.”
Grace thinks about a pear-sized Eridian, teal-green or rich brown or some other color entirely. Grace thinks about watching it sleep. Grace thinks about speaking to it softly, some of the first auditory input it'll ever receive.
“When you tell them, Rocky, let them know to meet me at the Hail Mary's lab level whenever they’re feeling ready. Looks like we have some work to do.”
Rocky takes a second to process. Then Grace's world tilts on its axis as warm sand swallows him down –- as claws rattling against clear xenonite punch the air from his lungs — as Rocky's jubilant song pitches up into the whistle register: yes yes yes.
Grace's lab has come to look quite different since landing on Erid. It reminds him of a biosafety level 4 facility, the sort where hazmat suits with external air supplies are worn to handle critical pathogens like ebola. Now, most of the lab kept in Eridian atmosphere and pressure, with robotic arms built into the clear xenonite barrier that Grace uses to pipette, measure, and move samples around with. For precision work like this, it's as comfortable as a claw machine joystick.
Most of the equipment that got damaged during spaceflight has been mechanically repaired by Eridian engineers, like his now-pristine microcentrifuge, but anything electronic remains, at best, janky and dysfunctional. He misses the digital calibrator of his infrared spectrometer more than he misses Kraft mac and cheese.
Luckily, molecular biology can generally be done in a glass box with some Gatorade and Redbull. (Only the Redbull is for the researcher.)
Grace pulls the tissue cultures in the incubator out with a robotic arm and slides them under the microscope for the tenth time today. Both the Rocky-egg line and Adrian-egg line are doing fantastic, growing happily along the bottom of the flask with no dead clumps, microbes, or other contamination in sight. Eridian egg cells, thankfully, are content to duplicate themselves endlessly as long as they’re kept at Eridian body temperature, instead of acting picky like human gametes. But he still handles them with care. After all, they're parts of his mates.
(Adrian had dropped off two slides at Grace's lab, each smeared with a few dozen eggs that had looked so, so lonely under the glare of his microscope. Apparently, Eridians lay that many eggs at once in a gelatinous sort of excretion, and the healthy embryos that form first will put out chemical messengers preventing the rest from maturing and producing an oversized litter. Grace had read about that twenty minutes before Adrian’s arrival.
“What the heck?!” he had exploded. “You — you can't just —- eggs? Are those eggs?”
“Rocky right that Grace stupid,” Adrian chirped. “What else would be? You said will study eggs to find fertility problem. Earth science advanced in this field, I checked.”
He maneuvers the robotic arms to deposit the two slides on a workbench, as gently as if he were transporting a spider's web.
“Yeah, but — already?! I'm still researching the biology here! I don't even have fresh cell media for them! We didn't even –- I suggested the idea to Rocky two hours ago!”
“Excite,” Adrian said simply, despite being a formidable natural scientist in their own right who knows these things can't be rushed. “Excite excite excite.”
And when he looked at those tiny, swimming things under a microscope, desperately searching for an egg with a different genome to fuse with, Grace's chest ached. One of those eggs –- any one of them — could eventually turn into his chi—
—Well, he should get the science out of the way first.)
Grace has verified what the Eridians already knew: there's nothing wrong with the chromosomal structure or physical components of either of his mates’ cells. The issue at hand is almost certainly within the DNA. To confirm that, he’d created embryos and tracked their development; it was obvious that cell division was happening way too rapidly and producing tissues that weren't organizing and signalling properly, leading to a quick death.
(...After that, he’d spent a day crying into his hands and reckoning with watching something he considers his child die in front of his eyes.
He arranged the flasks of dead embryos together, so they're close to their siblings, and buried them in the gravelly dirt of his biodome in the Eridian fashion. He didn’t see how helpless they look, plastic flasks in a hand-scraped hole, through the blur of his tears.)
Now, with DNA established as his target, he needs to get his ass into gear and work. He owes it to the rest of these egg cells to fix whatever’s not functioning decently enough to give them a real chance at life. The next step is a long trawl through papers that, very unhelpfully, have never done damage assessment on xenobiological samples in a 28 atm ammonia environment before.
“Grace!” his radio transceiver crackles, and distraction be damned, he can't help but smile at Rocky's cheery voice. “How is progress, question? We find paper in your science database discussing error correction in RNA ♫ ♩ ♪ and how to improve—“
“Hey, give me a second, Rock. I can't plan any improvements until I know what's going on with the eggs in the first place, and that's what I'm trying to read up on right now.”
“So read!” Rocky insists. “Read fast!”
“I'm trying, but this nosy Eridian just keeps yammering in my earpiece and disturbing me.“
“Humans inefficient useless. Incapable of multitask, incapable of talk to mate while—”
”Rocky.” Grace can't wipe the stupid grin off his face. ”It's great to hear you so energetic again. I feel like it's... been a while.”
Only the faint background hum of the transceiver carries over for a second.
“...Lot to be energize for,” Rocky admits, softly, in that particular waver Grace has come to read as self-conscious. “At first not even sure about telling you egg troubles, thought you might think mates defective broken bad, but instead you are helping solve problem. Feels... hope.”
“I'd never think that about you or Adrian, no matter what.”
“But humans love hate each other for defect! I read all of Wikipedia—”
“Not me. I'm a coward, remember? That's the biggest defect a human can have. And you still like me, so of course I still like you.”
Rocky makes this scraping sort of noise, like he's physically repulsed by what he hears. “Savior Grace,” he says. “Savior. Never coward. Not when matter.”
Savior, Grace mulls over, tabbing between protocols that will cause explosions in his lab equipment. To Erid, maybe. And hopefully, a savior to my… to those eggs.
It takes... well, Grace decides to stop tracking the passage of time so he doesn't go insane. It takes long enough that he can feel his Ph.D. supervisor breathing down his neck. This should've been done three weeks ago, Ryland! You should have run the experiments five times over already!
But eventually, after incredible amounts of trial and error and blasting Eridian DNA through a mass spectrometer, he devises protocols that just might work. It takes every kind of chromatography and spectroscopy, custom electronics builds, dubious repurposing of ship lasers, and routine humiliation, but he manages to check for every kind of DNA damage and compares it to that of standard Eridian genomes. A radiationless planet means Eridian nucleotides are relatively pristine, so the lesioned regions in Rocky-egg and Adrian-egg DNA are intensely, ridiculously obvious, even accounting for experimental errors. When he diagrams out each chromosome on a whiteboard and colors the damaged sites red, the result looks like pepperoni pizza.
Think, Grace, he scolds himself. What could be causing these legions? It's not space radiation; Adrian's never been to space and has the same lesion patterns appear in their eggs. It's not a common deficiency in DNA repair enzymes; the genes controlling those enzymes look as fine as any other Eridian's, per the genome database. If it's environmental, then any other Eridian sharing that environment should exhibit similar breaks and mutations in their—
Grace drops his dry-erase marker and doesn't hear it clatter to the floor.
It's oxidative damage.
The specific breaks and mutations — of course it's oxidative damage. It's free radical stress from things like hydroxyl ions in the bloodstream, because—
—because Rocky and Adrian are getting far more exposure to atmospheric oxygen than any other Eridian, due to small defects in their exosuits, in their tunnel systems, just like how Grace's own air is slightly tinged with ammonia—
—and their cellular respiration is designed to seize any precious oxygen available and reduce it, but woefully unprepared to deal with an overabundance, and so it manifests like this. Embryo-killing mutations.
This is Grace's fault.
He doesn't remember exactly when the tears start to fall.
God, these months of trying and waiting and heartbreak are on him. Rocky's broken, staticked voice, his legs trying to shield his carapace—
(He's on the dormitory level, somehow, buried into the bed like the blanket there can hide him from himself.)
—He should've never encouraged such a rapid expansion of the tunnel system, he should've never encouraged such heavy use of exosuits — he should've never taken an innocent, young couple as mates no matter their insistence because of course this was going to happen, of course they're incompatible, how could this ever have worked?!
He imagines Rocky shaking in anger when he finds out, and Adrian putting themselves between their much-smaller mate and the alien that poisoned them both—
“Grace!”
The gait is Rocky's, voice high and swaying.
“Grace is okay, question?” A few taps against xenonite, and a few more even louder to glean higher definition. “Hiding in sleep fabric, leaking from face. Something is wrong. Experiment not working, question?”
“It — it worked,” Grace croaks out. It's a miracle Rocky understands him at all from how the pillow muffles and warps each word. “I figured out what's causing the damage.”
“Amaze!” Rocky cheers. ”Now can move onto fix! This occasion is happy, sad is illogical. Grace should be happy!”
“It –- it's — I hurt you.” He wipes his face, but a fresh wave of tears come from imagining Rocky's precious jazz hands behind him. “I hurt both of you. My atmosphere, the oxygen, it –- it leaked into yours and mutated your egg cells' DNA over time. It probably damaged the rest of your worker cells, too. It's going to have effects on your health and lifespan, to say the least. You should probably get out of the biodome now, to avoid further damage.”
There would've been a charged silence between them, but Grace keeps on interrupting it with pathetic-sounding sobs that make him even angrier at himself. What the hell kind of “savior” creates a biodome that will slowly poison the entire planet as it leaks?! Are his students that visit regularly in trouble already? Are–-
“That's it, question?” Rocky tilts his carapace when Grace turns to gawk at him. “Grace leaking everywhere over solvable problem, question?”
“Solvable?! Your freaking cells are—”
“Lots of things unsafe for Eridian cells. Xenonite components used to destroy Eridian cells! Build technology to make it more safe, just like humans build for radiation and toxins. Grace is stupid, question?”
“But Rocky, I have no idea if this can even be fixed, especially in somatic–-”
“Will reinforce atmosphere systems, limit air exchange. Will use human science for healing affected cells. Generations of Eridians had life shortened from primitive applications and manufacture of xenonite, sometimes by centuries. Discovering electromagnetic waves and reaching spaceflight, same. Overcame then, will overcome now.”
“This biodome is literally a radiating death nuke in the middle of–-”
“Not talk about Savior Grace so negative.” Rocky's scolding tone makes Grace flinch. “You and your environment worth it. You adjust to Erid life and Eridian culture. We can do same, adjust to you. It is our honor.”
As if to prove his point, Rocky emerges into Grace’s side of the dormitory in his form-fitting exosuit, the one whose clear walls are thin enough for his body heat to radiate through as gentle, pulsing warmth. He plops himself onto the bed, resting two legs over Grace's curled form while holding his jaw in the claws of a third, and, wow.
He's beautiful.
Swearing at Grace's overreactive stupidity in Eridian once he runs out of English curses, and beautiful.
Grace thinks Rocky may be right about his stupidity, because he feels idiotic as all heck right now.
He retraces his steps through the problem at hand, waiting for some crippling miscalculation to wail at him like a tornado siren. The job is to rehabilitate the gametes and make them capable of producing a full embryo again, ideally in a way that translates well to rehabilitating oxidative stress in any other cell, as well. Fixing the lesions themselves is a losing game –- new ones will appear just as quickly as old ones heal so long as the oxygen problem remains. That means he has to improve the self-repair mechanisms coded into Eridian DNA instead, so it can correct its own lesions no matter where they form.
He's tried a few things already. He's introduced plasmids coding for repair enzymes into Eridian gametes — and weren't those, some of the simplest tools of molecular biology, just a bitch to get working — but those gametes haven't seen much improvement. He's introduced plasmids coding for transcription factors, a corollary that achieves the same general result, and still saw nothing significant. He managed to insert duplicates of repair enzyme genes into the Eridian genome — including repair genes he isolated from the hardy Taumoeba, which should be great at it — and still, not really.
What isn't working here? he asks himself for the millionth time. Taumoeba have to eat astrophages, so they need to resist mutations from radiation and related sources. But they're microbes with a lifespan of days, so even their self-repair isn't sophisticated enough for the long-lived Eridians.
Grace does not like where this is going, because there's no way the remaining alternatives will be easy or likely to work.
He could try directed evolution on native Eridian repair enzymes, making them more efficient at minimal risk. But it's bitter work, outside of his expertise, and the papers he's read don't suggest he'll achieve the orders of magnitude of improved error correction needed within a decent timeframe. Though it's certainly an option.
He could, instead, try to take an already robust DNA repair system designed around handling oxidative stress and insert that into Eridian DNA. It's a long, long shot.
...The only DNA that he could even use as the insert is his own.
He really should do the directed evolution. It's going to work. It'll just take time. Why does he even feel like he's stuck on a problem? There's no problem. The obvious answer is directed evo—
—He's gone and designed a full CRISPR-Cas system for use in Eridian biologies, which almost made him go grey with stress. He's translated the language of human DNA into its Eridian counterpart, and turned his own repair enzyme genes into Eridian DNA through a simple polymerase chain reaction. He's done the transfection, introducing all the CRISPR components into both Rocky-egg and Adrian-egg cell lines.
What's supposed to happen is that the Cas protein will link up to a guide molecule, which will take it to the exact site in the Eridian genome where the new repair genes should go. The Cas protein is a nuclease, so it'll cut the DNA there, and the Eridian cell's own repair machinery will arrive to fix the break. But the machinery will get confused, because Cas is also carrying the new repair genes along, too, so it’ll accidentally integrate those new genes into the break site as it's fixed.
It's a freaking miracle that this convoluted process works on human cells at all. There's no way it'll work in this insane, unpredictable context. Hell, there's no way human repair enzymes will even operate as efficiently in the Eridian cell environment. Grace is crazy for wasting his time on this. Just like water-free life, this'll be another shameful failure on his scientific record.
It's so bad, in fact, that he's refused to divulge what he's doing to Rocky and Adrian despite their insistence. They're going to laugh at him. Human genes in an Eridian cell, question? You think after all you've done to wreck our cells, you deserve to be a genetic parent to our children, question?
And when the insertion does work, the sinking in his chest doesn’t halt. This’ll just fail at a later step, is all. So Grace makes a single embryo from the CRISPR-edited cell lines, puts it in the incubator, and tries to forget about how he'll need to bury it later.
He cleans up his workbench, documents his protocol for a paper he'll never publish, and tabs back over to reading about directed evolution.
“Grace reading again, question?”
Across the lab, tapping on the xenonite wall behind Grace for a better look, is Adrian. They barely fit in these Rocky-sized tunnels, being almost thrice his size, and the xenonite bends green light so that they almost look blue from this angle, like Earth's ocean under the sunlit sky. “I thought Grace was running experiment today.”
“Pursuing a better path now,” Grace manages to say.
It's still... hard, he supposes, to face Rocky and Adrian while knowing his air is poisoning them, even after they’d reinforced each of their barriers. They still watch him sleep and insist he watch theirs, still spend their spare time with him, still rile him up and try to make him laugh — but what's it for? So he can ruin their lives?
Grace thinks not infrequently about how Erid has the tech to send him in a ship back to Earth. He wouldn't survive the flight, sure, but that's got to be better than maintaining a cancerous biosphere where all the planet’s children go to study, fucking hell.
“Grace is sad lately.” Adrian comments. Their voice is like a violin piece played in legato, each note melting into the next, and Grace finds it so lovely it hurts. All of this hurts. “Is because this science is difficult, question?”
“Proteomics was always my enemy,” he responds, noncommittal, scrolling.
“Rocky tell me Grace is trying a CRISPR experiment today. Accurate, question?”
Grace stops.
“How did — are you –- why did he tell you that?”
“He used light-to-texture converter on your computer, saw information about CRISPR. Adrian research it for him, amaze amaze amaze. Humans really discover immune process in simple microbe and transform it into gene editing, question? Wish could visit Earth, see science for self. Grace is using Taumoeba as donor DNA, question?”
“...Taumoeba genes wouldn't give us as much repair improvement as we need,” Grace says. He desperately wants to lie outright. Heck, in a few days, it'll basically be the truth: there'll no longer be any CRISPR experiment, just a dead embryo. But hasn't he already treated Rocky and Adrian poorly enough?
“What use instead for donor, question?” Adrian asks so sweetly, so sharply, and because they're one of Erid's preeminent scientists with a whip-smart brain that Grace can't help but adore, he knows they already know the answer.
“Adrian,” he says instead, the computer screen starting to blur before him, “do you hate me?”
He hears scuttling from over his shoulder, like Adrian is bouncing off the walls with anxiety like Rocky does, only with less room to maneuver. “Hate Grace? Why hate Grace, question? Bad bad bad.“
”For all your dead children. The ones you and Rocky mated to make, and the ones I've made, watched die, and buried.”
“Grace come here.”
“I'm reading someth—”
”Grace come here, demand.”
Grace stands, chest hollow, and relocates to the xenonite wall against which two of Adrian's claws are pressed. The surface is warm against his aching shoulders, sharply contrasting the oxygen side's gentle chill. Adrian tap-tap-taps the wall to get a better look at him, at his hands pressing the tears back from his eyes.
“Did mates do something to make Grace think he is hated, question?”
“Who wouldn't hate me in this circumstance, Adrian? You two wanted kids and I completely ruined it for you.”
“Before wanted kids, just wanted Rocky. Separated for years, thought maybe separated forever. Bad bad bad. Grace bring Rocky back. For this gift, no matter consequences, Adrian forever love Grace.”
Grace says nothing.
“Not just bring Rocky, but bring Taumoeba and Earth science to Erid. So much to learn! So many improvements, all across planet, even though few years since arrive. Health, ecosystem, infrastructure all improve. And Adrian get to know Savior Grace, leaky soft alien species with weird limb arrangement. Get to take him as mate, even though every other Eridian wants him as mate, too. If sacrifice was for this, happy happy happy.”
“You didn't choose that sacrifice.” Grace looks at his hands. They're callused in strange places, now, from hours on end of manipulating robot arms and scrolling abstracts. “You were forced into it.”
God, it hurts.
Adrian trills –- their best imitation of human laughter. “If sacrifice requires choice in Earth culture, then choose Grace Grace Grace.”
...And that makes something open up in Grace's chest a little, whirring apart like the Hail Mary's centrifuge cables.
“Rocky, he was... when he told me about the most recent nonviable eggs, I'd never seen him so upset. Each time you guys told me about the failures, you’d sound so defeated, it just…”
“All Eridians sad sometimes,” Adrian interrupts gently. “Always something could be sad over. No reason to throw away life or mate because of it.”
“And I...” Grace removes his glasses to wipe the teardrops clinging there. “I started to want it, too. The... the kids. The way you guys would talk about it, like I was a part of it...”
“Grace always part of it. If Grace or other Eridians can make biological offspring possible, amaze amaze. If not, no worry needed. Rest of Erid for Grace and mates to love.”
...And if Grace falls asleep that night curled like a comma on the edge of the dormitory bed, because Adrian in their exosuit is taking up the entire rest of the mattress, then sue him. It's some of the best sleep he's had in a while.
“...Rocky? Since when were you here?”
“Come to watch you sleep.”
“We're really pushing the physical limits of this bed here, guys.”
“Can fix if break,” Rocky declares proudly.
“Since when does Rocky take care of sleep nest, question?” Adrian teases.
Something snaps, and the bed sinks ten inches lower to the ground. Grace sighs, just for the show of it. Just so his mates don't get too used to how freaking pleased he is to wake up to their radiating warmth each morning.
His mates, he reminds himself. His mates, who showed up for him, who don't hate him even a little over the whole atmosphere-poisoning situation. Who don't mind, apparently, if they can never have kids, because the planet keeps spinning even without.
But to hell with that. They want kids — all three of them do — and Grace will go through hell and high water to make it happen. Even if it means—
“Uh, Rocky, Adrian... what would you think if your offspring had, well... a bit of human DNA?”
“Would it make offspring leaky disgusting?“ Rocky demands.
“...No.”
“Then amaze. Is possible, question?”
“Is this Grace's experiment, question?” Adrian cuts in, ever astute. “Grace combine embryos with human DNA for anti-mutation property, question?”
“Wait wait wait. Grace is already try?! In lab? Right now? Egg with human DNA? Is working, question?!”
“Well, I — I don't know yet. I just set up the embryos a day ago.”
“We go check we go check we go check—”
“Whoa, hold on! We'll need a few days before we can tell they're viable–-”
“Check check check—”
“Rocky is correct,” Adrian says, pitching high, as they scoop Rocky atop their carapace with two of their legs. “We go check now.”
Grace doesn't even get to wipe the sleep-crusties out of his eyes before he’s angling a microscope down at the embryo culture flask and tilting the computer screen toward the Eridians' texture converter.
It's still alive.
It's still alive a week later, dividing along happily.
It's still alive, somehow, five weeks later, just starting to differentiate in a way a microscope can discern. Rocky and Adrian spend a long time each day staring at the texture panel, watching the little cells wriggle and slowly, painstakingly divide in two.
No one's ready to get their hopes up yet, but something thick hangs in the silence; a sword suspended from a fine string of hair.
Two months. The fivefold symmetry is clear now. The millimeter-long legs are starting to form tripod claws on each tip, frayed like the split ends on Grace's hair.
Grace has worked out an equivalent therapy for non-gamete worker cells in the meantime. Every Eridian, it seems, is clamoring to get his human DNA fortification procedure into their labs to turn this into a mass health service, and not even because they're terrified of free radical oxidation. They just want to be part-alien, too, in the microscopic ways that matter.
Rocky doesn't talk about it, but Grace has seen the little stone tablet he works on while Grace rests in bed. It's a list, carved in his best handwriting, of potential names.
Five Earth months marks the halfway point to a complete Eridian incubation period. Grace thinks it's serendipitous that humans and Eridians develop embryonically for such a similar amount of time. Adrian dismisses that notion outright, confident that humans are actually embryonic until they learn how to walk. That's the mark of an Eridan's successful hatch, after all: a little rock-bug that stands on its own wobbly legs.
Rocky and Adrian are not talking because they can't agree on an Eridian name. Grace, when asked to mediate and come up with a compromise name, bangs something out on his keyboard that somehow earns both his mates' ire. Now he's been voted off the naming committee, but they're still not talking.
The little thing's cells are mostly obscured by a thin shell of inorganic material, now, porous and multitextured like rock beneath the microscope. In the incubation flask where the embryo is actually growing, it looks like a translucent, thin-membraned egg with something dark inside, like the innards of a dumpling steaming between chopsticks.
“If not graceful, why name is Grace, question?”
Grace huffs and readjusts the microscope again after bumping it out of focus with the robotic arm for the third time. The lens, focusing, displays three little claws at the end of a leg, each no bigger than the sharpened tip of a pencil. It'll happen just about any day now. The first test-tube Eridian. The first little, tiny piece of him.
“'Grace' can also mean 'mercy',” he defends. “I think that fits.”
“Have mercy on microscope by not banging it into pieces,” Rocky says.
“Adrian is so much nicer than you.”
“Correct correct correct.”
The image on the computer screen jolts, just slightly, and Grace thinks holy shit. She’s really, actually alive.
Grace hears her name in Eridian for the first time and cries. It's a clear elaboration on the language's word for “indulgence,” as in “mercy,” “grace,” “reprieve.”
With such a minute amount of his DNA, she's indistinguishable from any other Eridian. He holds her for the first time later that day as she scooches around in a xenonite ball the size of a large orange. His hands shake and shake. She herself is crab-sized, five legs scrabbling for purchase on even the roughest surface, and her carapace is the muted gray-purple color of a cooled lava flow, shot through with Adrian-green in her hinges.
He cries again, holding her, and she tries to mimic the blubbering noise of his sobs in her flutelike voice.
Grace does as many tests on her cells as he can get away with, which is infuriatingly few for a molecular biologist used to prying cells off any old petri dish or cheek swab. Entering her mouth always carries an infection risk, and he'd never forgive himself for making her sick. So he contents himself with watching her as she grows tall and strong and smart, and holding her in his palms as she grows in size and weight, and sitting right by her as she sleeps and digests, and singing her the human songs she thinks sound like funny proto-Eridian speech, the sorts in the plays she likes about cave-people. He fetches her from the water when her xenonite ball gets tossed a bit too harshly on a wave, and relents when she wants to try it again, loving the thrill of airtime.
He thinks she gets that from Adrian, who will stand in the shallows in their exosuit to feel the chill and vibration of water crashing over their legs, their carapace rocking in concentration like they’re considering venturing deeper.
There’s eventually a round of rock-paper-scissors to choose her English name, which Adrian wins. Rocky pouts extravagantly about this — the best a faceless, front-less species can pout, anyway — and Grace just hopes it's something he can take seriously.
And as their tiny, jubilant child jazzes her claws in elation and rolls her wet ball through the white sand, getting the entire thing caked in mud, Adrian settles their own ball next to where Grace is standing.
“What you think of name 'Tide'?” they ask softly, warbling with apprehension.
And that makes Grace cry, too.