across an immense ethereal gulf

I tracked down a copy of this invaluable classic and somehow got my hands on a near pristine copy secondhand from the 4th printing. It’s lost the dustjacket, alas, but that means I got it for like £5 and not the £4200 a first edition printing in fine condition goes for.

(Who’s the author? *looks at smudge on spine* uhhhh Mkkhill Montanann)

It looks right at home in my bookcase 🥰

Under the cut: a look inside at what the book holds:

"Us? Oh, of *course* our Dachshund sleeps inside- we just let him out in the morning and make sure he comes back for dinner. He just does his own thing, no worries."

"Um, you know it's not humane to keep a chihuahua confined to an apartment? They're dogs, they're natural predators. They need to experience hunting behaviors or they get depressed. No we don't leash ours, he absolutely hates it, we just let him come and go whenever."

Yall get how fucking stupid that sounds, right? So stop letting your goddamn cats get eaten and attacked and infected and hit by cars

A toddler would probably love full unattended access to the neighborhood too, but we don't do that either, do we

baby doesn't hatch until every other crew member is dead. rocky was not actually expecting them to hatch at all. there was more than one egg. there is one baby

eggs were moved to engineering, is how there is still one baby

timings work out such that rocky gets a good couple months being Completely Fucking Alone except for some eggs that may or may not still die.

rocky has never previously looked at an egg and thought 'oh that's a baby'. every egg in a clutch hatching is very rare. if none of them hatch rocky is going to kill himself, statement

AND THEN. BABY.

he's not even quite AT tau ceti so now on top of trying to pilot the ship by himself he's figuring out some kind of baby bouncer which is not actually standard eridian nursery furniture. eridian babies can walk within hours. eridian babies clamber. rocky needs the baby to remain in his reach until the baby's carapace has hardened enough to withstand falling from any height, please. please.

he is just narrating absolutely fucking everything to the baby. this is how we pilot the ship. this is how we've juryrigged the ship so piloting it solo is possible. this is xenonite, rocky is making toys so we stop grabbing random tools. that's a wrench. that's a– nope that's a saw! babies don't get those!

baby's first word is an expletive

baby does not have a name, because rocky is not thinking of them as His Baby. this is someone else's kid he is keeping alive until he can get them back to their actual living relatives. he doesn't get to name them, that would be insane

this line of thinking lasts until the baby has enough language processing to assume their name is the nickname rocky uses most frequently. which is just 'kid'

at which point rocky is like. okay. you need a name. i am still Just Some Random Guy. so YOU get to pick your name

but the baby is now an eridian toddler. so the baby's picks are a) sounds they like b) nouns of things they like c) words they've heard once and think are pretty. baby name [single C chord, eridian equivalent of being named ɓ]. baby name Spinning. baby name Rations. baby name Electrolytic Etching. baby name Electrolytic ɓ Spinning Spinning Spinning

and rocky is the fun uncle, rocky does not have access to parenting books or neonatal classes or even his own parents. rocky is making this up as he goes. rocky is calling the baby Electrolytic ɓ Spinning Spinning Spinning

and yknow. rocky is autistic, obviously. the blip-A crew skewed pretty autistic for the same reasons the petrova task force skewed pretty autistic. the baby is also autistic

rocky is spending a lot of time holding off his own meltdown so he can deal with the baby's meltdown, and he is literally just Withstanding It because what else can he do. sometimes when the baby starts screaming he also starts screaming. this never helps. they just scream themselves out together

he tells the baby a lot of stories. he tells them about their parents, what he knows of their relatives, what erid is like. he tells them his favourite stories from when he was a kid, his favourite stories now. adrian's favourite stories

by the time grace turns up the baby is equivalent to human ten – for the purposes of this AU eridian infancy is a few weeks but childhood is a few decades and a bit stagnant / based on molts. after first molt they're human-five-ish, and they hover around there until second molt kicks them to preadolescence, and then third molt is teenage and we're not there yet – and could probably qualify for an engineering apprenticeship. which is not normal, developmentally

rocky tries to keep the kid away from grace at least at first. it does not work even a little bit. your new best friend the spider rock, and your other new best friend the smaller even more excitable spider rock. they're so lucky grace can spot a middle schooler from a hundred metres because he has no concrete reason not to assume they're both adults

grace: oh that's a child. that's definitely a child. oh this is so cool, getting to meet an alien child and see how their development works compared to ours and ........WHY IS THERE A CHILD. ON THE SPACESHIP.

rocky explains they didn't mean there to be a child on the spaceship but sometimes people dying enmass of an unknown terrifying illness make ill-advised decisions regarding egg fertilisation control. so now rocky and the kid are making do, until they can get back to erid and get the kid back to their family

The whole metaverse can no longer be properly viewed without an account and I am definitely not making one just to see your contact info or opening hours.

Prediction: I will alternate between all the pens in my collection and finally get to enjoy using all of them!