4: A Star Is Born

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She’s the ugliest thing that Tyk has ever seen.

Tyk was right to be concerned that the early hatching might indicate problems. The larval star that stumbles out is similar to a person in some ways and different in others; she’s much darker in colour than a normal baby, but her flesh looks about the right texture, soft and puffy and waiting for a carapace to grow in properly. She’s enormous, as one would expect of a god, her head a good three times higher off the ground than Tyk’s own. She moves clumsily, uncertainly, with egg silk still clinging to much of her body, individually wrapping her limbs in a way that it doesn’t on normal babies. And then she steps out onto the ground, and Tyk realises, in dull horror, that the entire back half of her body is missing.

She doesn’t have a tail. She doesn’t have six legs. She totters forward on two legs (or claws, possibly? They might be malformed claws; she’s completely missing her claws) with just the front half of her body balanced on top. She lacks not only claws, but horns; the top part of her head is free of the egg silk and Tyk can see that the forehead is bare over her single pair of tiny, high-set eyes. The top half of her head seems able to swivel freely; she moves it about to look around without having to move her mandibles, which are set lower and wreathed in egg silk still. They’re long for a newborn, about proportional to Tyk’s own mandibles (which makes them much larger in practice, since the larva is huge – or at least, the front half of her is three time the size of Tyk’s front half, making her a little bit larger than Tyk on the whole but not all that much, considering how much of her body is missing), and seem to have a wide range of movement. Like Tyk’s own mandibles, they have a joint where they meet the… jaw?… and one a bit further than halfway down, and a final joint right near the end. Unlike Tyk’s mandibles, they each end in a bunch of prehensile bristles. The godling moves about, somehow alive, despite its horrifying injuries.

Tyk wonders, for a moment, whether the exhaustion and stress of the night’s digging has gotten to her. Or perhaps she ate something toxic in the sand that she hasn’t noticed. She must be hallucinating. Or maybe she passed out on the riverbank, and is dreaming.

Then the larva stumbles, and she rushes forward to help.

It seems that the larva hadn’t noticed her until that moment, because she leaps back with a little yelp, retreating towards the egg. Tyk drops her head down, flattening her mandibles to the ground, crooning comfortingly. The larva, staring, freezes. She splays the tendrils at the end of her own mandibles and raises them high, exposing her underside in what Tyk thinks might be a gesture of vulnerability, and steps forward. Asking for help? Maybe. That would be expected behaviour from a newborn.

Tyk mimics the gesture, stretching up high and lifting her own wide open mandibles; the larva squeaks again and leaps back, retreating back into her egg.

Well, that’s not the right signal to give then. Apparently. Tyk has never seen a newborn climb back into her egg, but then, babies are usually born under the observation and care of their parents. It’s probably very frightening to be born alone, except for some being that can’t possibly be your mother. Does the baby know that she’s a god? Why is she here? Perhaps her mother laid it too close to the earth and it fell down. Perhaps her mother knew that she was badly deformed in the egg, and abandoned her here. Tyk feels a sudden wave of rage at the injustice. Surely not. Surely a mother wouldn’t do that. Even if the baby was destined to die shortly after hatching, the hive would be there for her until she did.

Maybe this is normal for gods. Maybe they lay their eggs upon the earth and the gods climb back to the skies at some point. Tyk searches her memory for any mention, any at all, in any history, of this happening before, and comes up clean.

Well, the stars in the sky are close to eternal, aren’t they? Most of them predate the first days of people observing them. Maybe gods have babies very, very rarely. Maybe the histories don’t go back far enough to record the last time.

Or maybe this poor, malformed larva was indeed abandoned, or fell by accident. Maybe the fall itself injured her, breaking her back half off somehow.

Either way, she needs help.

Tyk can’t go for help. The hive is too far away; the godling could easily die before anyone gets back. Someone will come out here eventually, looking for her or investigating the fallen star or both, but until then, things are up to Tyk.

Tyk doesn’t know anything about looking after babies.

The godling comes back out of the hole in her shell. It’s a very large shell, Tyk notes; much, much larger than the larva coming out of it. Tyk drops flat to the ground again, a posture that seemed to reassure the larva last time.

The larva approaches her. Slowly, cautiously. She seems stable enough on just her two legs, and doesn’t look to be actively dying, although Tyk isn’t sure what that would look like. She stops a few body lengths away from Tyk and lies on the ground, mandibles flat to the earth, imitating Tyk’s posture.

Tyk, very slowly, lifts the front half of her body back up. The larva does the same thing, raising her mandibles again, and this time Tyk doesn’t imitate the gesture; it scared the larva last time. Instead, she creeps forward, step by very slow step. Once she’s covered about half the distance between them, the larva moves back a little, and Tyk stops. She holds still as the larva covers the remaining distance in a few steps and slowly reaches one of her mandibles out to touch Tyk’s.

Tyk holds still while the larva runs the end of her mandible up along Tyk’s mandible and over her head, her horns. Her pulpy, carapace-free baby flesh feels strange, soft, yielding, but there’s some sort of rigid structure inside that gives her body more strength than the larvae that Tyk is used to. Tyk moves her head to look at her better, and the larva leaps back out of reach, startled, so Tyk focuses on remaining perfectly still when the larva approaches again.

She inspects Tyk’s head and back with her mandibles, which is pretty standard larva behaviour in Tyk’s experience. When she reaches for Tyk’s belly, Tyk pushes her away, and she respects this – a polite baby. Tyk waits until she’s done, and then rears up on her back legs to inspect the larva.

Tyk is too worried about hurting her soft flesh to touch her very much, but most of her body is still covered in egg silk. Tyk nips at it, trying to cut it off, but it’s surprisingly tough, and as soon as she starts, the larva pushes her away.

“No, it’s got to come off,” Tyk says, and gets back to work. “You can’t just walk around in – ” but she’s pushed away again, and this time the larva retreats several steps.

Tyk gives up. The silk will come off eventually, and it’s not worth scaring a baby over, even an enormous baby star. The larva does at least seem more fascinated by Tyk than frightened now, which is an improvement; without a mother, somebody’s going to have to teach the poor thing, and fascination is a better basis for that than fear.

Not Tyk, of course. One of the adults will adopt the godling. But presumably she will be equally fascinated by them.

The larva taps the end of one mandible against her chest, and speaks for the first time. “Smon.”

Smon? Is that her name? In Tyk’s experience, girls are named by their parents, but maybe stars are born knowing their names. Maybe their names are sung to them in the egg, like how men teach boys the wingsong. Evidence for the theory that god eggs are supposed to be dropped and abandoned on the ground.

Tyk repeats the name. “Smon.”

Smon wobbles her head, which presumably means something.

Tyk taps a claw against her own chest. “Tyk.”

Smon aims a mandible at Tyk. “Tyk.”

The pronunciation isn’t great. Smon elongates the hum in the middle and can’t seem to replicate the closing click properly. But it’s an obvious attempt at pronouncing Tyk’s name, so Tyk flicks a mandible in assent, thinks a second, and replicates Smon’s head wobble signal instead.

And then Smon does something very strange.

She replicates Tyk’s mandible flick. But not using her whole mandible. Instead, she raises both mandibles to her mouth, as if eating something, extends one of the protrusions at the end of each mandibles, holds them in position as if they were tiny mandibles, and imitates Tyk’s flick of assent with one of the protrusions.

This baffles Tyk. Why not do the gesture properly, with the whole mandible? Smon’s mandibles are further below her mouth than Tyk’s; does she think that mouth position is an important part of the gesture? Or does she lack the range of motion in her mandibles, perhaps? Unlikely; it looks like her mandibles have a bigger range of motion than Tyk’s own. Maybe it’s a size thing; maybe she thinks her mandibles are too big. They are bigger than Tyk’s, but only because she’s bigger than the front half of Tyk’s body; proportionally, there’s not much difference. Of course, that’s only true if you compare Smon to the front half of Tyk – Maybe Smon is comparing their whole bodies, unaware that the back half of hers is missing. Although the missing half doesn’t seem to be causing her much difficulty – maybe this is just what stars look like. Half a person.

Tyk repeats the gesture of assent, slowly. Smon imitates it again, once again using just a tiny protrusion at the end of the mandible instead of the whole thing. Tyk gives up trying to understand.

Smon fiddles with something stuck to the silk on her mandible for a bit (is a stone stuck to her? No; it’s something complicated, something Tyk has never seen before) and drops to the ground. She scrabbles out in the dirt until she collects a small pile of pebbles. She clears an area of ground, and places one pebble on it, points at it, and says a name. She puts two pebble nearby, and says another name. A pile of three pebbles, and a third name. What are…?

Ah, not names. Numbers. The gods use names for numbers? Maybe. The way Smon speaks is a bit strange, a sound halfway between real speech and wingsong. She speaks with a lot of long humming sounds, longer than Tyk can make, but there are some proper pops and clicks scattered in there, too. Sounds that can approximate names, but it would be very hard for Smon to pronounce actual words, Tyk thinks.

Do the gods have a language made entirely of names? A language of names that they know from birth, as Smon knew her own name? That’s…

Smon is waiting for her response. Tyk taps the singular stone with a claw. “One.” The pair of two stones. “Two.” The pile of three. “Three.” To clarify that she understands what’s happening, she makes a pile of four and five, and gives those numbers, too. Smon gives those piles names, which Tyk doesn’t even try to memorise; there’s something about the way Smon hums, the way she starts sounds very suddenly but trails off at the end, the way she varies sounds based on characteristics other than straight pitch while speaking in an almost monotone, that Tyk finds difficult to follow.

They count numbers up to a full eight, then Tyk tries something else. “Two,” she says, making the appropriate pile. Then another pile, “Three.” She pools them together. “Two plus three is five.”

Smon gets very excited about this. She separates the stones and makes Tyk do a couple more simple equations, then does the opposite, with simple subtraction calculations. She lays out stones in simple grids to get the words for multiplication and division. Despite Smon not being able to pronounce the relevant words, Tyk can’t help but be impressed by her mathematical prowess, to understand the concepts so soon after birth. She’s getting the impression that stars are born with much wisdom.

Smon makes more piles; nine, ten, eleven stones. She asks for their words, and Tyk provides them. Smon, for some reason, gets incredibly excited about this; she hops up and down on her two legs and clicks the ends of her mandibles together. Then she dashes off to gather more stones. Tyk, not sure what to make of this, just waits for things to make sense.

After a minute or so, Smon has accrued a large pile of small stones, as well as a few larger stones. She lines the small stones up in piles, one to seven, but for eight, puts one of the larger stones. Nine is a large stone and a small stone; ten is a large stone and two small stones.

“Yes, good, you understand how numbers work,” Tyk says, while Smon, nattering in her incomprehensible language of names, makes piles for eleven, twelve and thirteen.

Then she clears the debris from more of the ground, and makes a second line of piles. One, two, three. This time, she goes all the way up to nine piles of small stones, and ten is a larger stone. Eleven is a larger and a smaller, twelve a larger and two smaller, and finally thirteen, a large stone and three small stones.

She points to the first line, the series that correctly identifies numbers as sets of eight, and points to Tyk. She points to Tyk’s legs and claws specifically, then to the stones again, then to Tyk. Then she points to the second line and to herself, and splays out the protrusions at the ends of her mandibles (five on each mandible, Tyk notices,) and points again to the second row.

“I have absolutely no idea what you’re trying to tell me,” Tyk says, while Smon, practically tripping over her own feet in her excitement, dashes back into her egg. Tyk settles down to wait for her to emerge again.

And that’s when Tyk hears her father’s wings behind her.

“Tyk?”

“Kesan.” Tyk waits for him to land on her horns, but instead he hovers in the air uncertainly.

“Are you alright?”

“I’m fine. Look at – ”

“I see it. That’s what fell from the sky?”

“Yes.”

“Is that an egg?”

“Yes!”

“How did you find – ?” And then he does land, or more like, he’s startled out of the sky. He seems to forget to fly, and Tyk has to dash forward to catch him on her horns.

Smon is peeking out of the hole in the egg.

“Oh, my stars,” Kesan says weakly.

“Well,” Tyk says. “One of them, anyway.”

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